Category Archives: Media

I’m a media studies graduate and with that comes a raftload of tools that I’m repeatedly told aren’t actually useful for anything, to which I counter that I like using them and enjoy the experience of applying those tools to all the media around me I partake in and therefore my life is enriched and overflowing with wonderful experiences of interconnectivity. By this point the other person has usually wandered off. Anyway, this is the category for anything that I think of as being connected to ‘media’, whether it’s a type (like TV, music, movies or so on), a brand (like Disney! Hi Disney!). This category also covers my weekly critical engagement column-type-thing currently called Story Pile.

Story Pile: Buddy Daddies

There’s a lot to be said for mid anime, in quality and in scope. Not an epic sprawling story meant to spin off for multiple seasons. Not a mystery that promises a resolution that it may completely bottle. Not trying to change your life, just trying to get you to tune in and look at some ads and maybe buy a wall scroll or two. Or fill out the extensive entries on the Internet Movie Firearm Database.

Buddy Daddies is a fundamentally a more ‘realistic’ show than you might imagine. It’s an unreality of high speed car chases and gunfights in cities, rather than grand political drama or telepathy and future sight. It’s grounded in that the characters have to spend time dealing with things like day care and clothing options and Japanese cultural assertions about how to blend in. Sometimes there are anime made because it lets them represent transitions between worlds and remarkable special effects and build on a particular visual language, but Buddy Daddies is an anime that doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do in a live action TV show, except doing it very cheaply and conveniently.

Here then, is your pitch: It’s an action comedy about a pair of single dads who adopt the same daughter, and also, they’re professional murderers. Hilarity ensues. Well, mild hilarity. Well there are jokes.

Modest spoiler warning ensues. I’m not about to tell you anything that you couldn’t predict looking at the poster.

A screencap from the anime Buddy Daddies!. It shows the principle cast standing in a line.Miri has been subtly edited to be higher in the frame and nobody is going to comment on this to me ever.
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Goblin, Vandal, Sugg

Every word you’ve ever used comes from somewhere. The structures you use to discuss ideas is informed by ideas that came before it. I’m not getting all Sapir-Worf about this (and if you don’t know what that is, you don’t have to know because it’s probably not true), but rather wanting to draw your attention to the way the world you live in is in part defined by the words you use. If you’re an English speaker, there are ways you describe food that are a byproduct of French invasion centuries ago. Words like ‘technocrat’ and ‘hyperspecialised’ are constructions that borrow from how intellectuals used to use Latin. Your swear words are almost all from the poor working class, and used to describe sex, god, or excrement, and that’s not how all swear words work in all cultures!

Your world shapes your language.

In any given fantasy setting you work on, you don’t usually have the same linguistic history to justify why the people there talk like we talk now. In fact, to be completely fair, they probably don’t talk like us at all: you have fantasy languages, across fantasy constructions. Any given phrase a character in your world says is probably not using the exact same words as we are and we’re all working with a sort of fictionalised fantasy that makes the concepts reasonably translate across.

There’s a whole treatise then about how we handle Native American names and loanwords that we italicise like etouffee.

Point is that you have words, in your world, and you can attach stories to them. You’ve probably seen me talk about Orcs and how they relate to language and stereotypes, along in my long post on the word ‘Orc’. Here’s another set of examples I like for my world of Cobrin’Seil, as they pertain to the best little evolved raccoons, the Goblins.

an icon of a goblin hut
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The Haka

Thinkin’ about the haka lately.

If you’re not familiar with haka, and I’m saying this before I check a wikipedia page on it it is a cultural celebration perhaps best compared to a dance, from the Maori culture out of Aotearoa, which I more commonly refer to as New Zealand, because it’s a habit and it dies hard. But yes, you may have seen this before, a scene of a group of usually men, usually rugby players, standing before an opposing team and doing a synchronised performance. I’m reluctant to call it a dance just because I know that dance is an English word, and I don’t necessarily want to distract from what haka are by what you might imagine if I call it just a ceremonial dance.

There’s this story that shows up about the haka, and it tends to be how people in the Northern Hemisphere finds out about it. Someone plays against the Aotearoan team in a sporting event, and the Aotearoan team opens by doing their haka. Then you get some early sports headline like:

Ireland unmoved by New Zealand Players’ War Dance

Followed by a headline an hour later like:

Ireland loses 16-2 against New Zealand.

And this is, to me, very funny, because why would you mention the haka and then why would you mention how Ireland was unaffected by that. And I’ve seen this headline structure multiple times! And part of that is a little bit unfair, because the haka is but one part of that story, where the bulk of the story is that international Aotearoan sports teams are made up of people really good at the sports they play. The footnote though, the thing that always hangs around the edges of it is people trying to express in some way of rearranged words that haka is somehow, bad. That it’s not cool as hell, that it’s inappropriate, that it’s being used at an inappropriate time.

This is, of course, racist as hell.

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Story Pile: Bee & Puppycat Comics

Up front, I guess I should say that after finishing the article, I found Bee And Puppycat an incredibly disappointing set of comics because I made the fool mistake of beliving they were ever going to be something they never told me they would be. I saw the cover art showing happy people in an energetic state and the idea of a temp magical girl resulting in perhaps something like an adventure or a quest or a hijink and never considered how many pages would instead be about comparing poo and chocolate. Still, there’s an interesting history to what these comics are and I’m sure you might like them if you try them and you know you’re only getting the packing peanuts between a story rather than any kind of story in and of itself.

the cover of bee and puppycat volume 1
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The Yawning Boredom Of The Word Epic

Good god this is a dull word, right?

Cancon was a fun convention, I liked it a lot. But while I was there, I saw this word being worn into a groove in my brain. It was an all-purpose descriptor, a vague and generic positivity, a detailer of scope and an encouragement for engaging, and every time I saw it I felt a bit of my brain shut down in response. I think some of this is just the normal overuse of meaningless words. If someone described a game as being ‘lit’ I would probably also just as much immediately ignore that descriptor. Packing peanut language, that kind of thing.

And I know it’s rich, coming from me to complain about overuse of cliche. I just said ‘packing peanuts’ which is something I am very selfconscious about saying a lot.

It’s not just the ungoogleable game Epic by Wise ‘Maybe We Don’t Want To Be Called White Wizards Any More’ Wizards. It’s also games like Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt Skullzfyre or Epic Resort or Tiny Epic and their franchise of genuinely exciting little games, or Crafting Epic Dungeons or Epic Scenery or Epicness Incarnate or Warhammer Epic or Epic Confrontation and you might not know if I made any of these games up, or all the other things I saw on the convention floor that just kept using the term, and every single time made me realise that in so doing, I now knew less about them than I would if almost any word was in that space.

an icon showing three divergent arrows

What is ‘epic’ for?

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Story Pile: Skip & Loafer

Why Talen, you may say, this isn’t smooch month any more. This is plain out ordinary March! March is a time for pi day and references to ‘march forth’ and more resentment of American culture for its permeating omnipresence! What’s with this anime, which is obviously a smooch month anime, set apart from its normal and natural habitat of the month where I talk about people doing smooches? It is, after all, so very, very obviously, an anime about a pair of characters who smooch, right?

Skip and Loafer | OFFICIAL TRAILER 2

Right?

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Remote Romance Is Older Than Boomers

Have you ever seen the word Swalk?

If you read, say, Biggles-style media, if you’re interested in World War 2 period media, you might have seen it, S W A L K, somewhere, usually on a letter, sometimes graffiti, maybe sometimes mentioned aloud. I saw it on a BC comic, by Johnny Hart, which isn’t an archive worth diving for an example. I can just imagine Hugh Lawrie saying it, in that doleful, soppy, romantic, I-know-I’m-the-stupid-person-in-the-room way of a Blackadder or Jeeves And Wooster episode, though I’ve no idea if at any point he says it. I know it came up on an episode of QI — part of a technique that came up in World War 2 for communicating a crude message to the recipient, in a way that looked deniable to anyone overseeing it.

See, you might see, on the back of an envelope, the letters SWAK or SWALK. It stood for ‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss.’ There were others like BURMA and NORWICH – and they were, mostly, filthy. It’s a touch of human contact during a period of extreme deprivation.

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Story Pile: Insomniacs After School

Introducing excellent things is hard. It’s hard for me because I naturally stray towards the understated or the contrary. You’ve probably heard me call something ‘boringly excellent,’ for example, and that means when I call something incredible or amazing, you might think that puts it on the same category as a really good sandwich or a really interesting academic concept, as opposed to here, where what I want to say is this romance anime is so good I find myself periodically nostalgic for the childhood it depicts that I never had even though it’s about kids with anxiety struggling to make a lot of friends.

This is an amazing story, it has lovely moments, it brings me joy, and I want to share that with you.

Spoiler Warning: I’m going to disclose some facts about the end of the series, and the nature of the kind of show it is, and what kind of show it’s not. Like, if you think ‘this series doesn’t include a mech battle’ is a spoiler, then yeah, you got me, it’s a spoiler, but I don’t plan on going deep on revelations about the eventual plot, okay?

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The Girl Who Loved Powerglide

Wait wait wait no this is about Transformers.

Transformers, in the 1980s, was a toy commercial. It was a toy commercial in the purest sense; every component that made it up was made in service of its purpose as a commercial material that was meant to frame commercials around it. It was, in the way that modern creators are struggling to avoid mentioning, hash-tag-content. There’s a standard opening, a standard ending, and three bumpers for just before The Commercials (Transformers Will Be Back, After These Messages) but those messages weren’t important. Those messages were other people paying Transformers money for making Transformers, but Transformers was double dipping. They were getting paid money to sell the space for these advertisements in their advertisement, for their toys. These bumpers were so important that in some episodes, the third bumper would appear, then an ad break and you’d wait through the ad break to come back to just watch the ending credits of the show. Got me again, there!

A screencap from the TV episode 'The Girl Who Loved Powerglide.' It shows Powerglide in flight.

These toys imposed a material demand on Transformers as a cartoon. Episodes wanted to focus on the toys that you could buy, and this meant that people got attached to toys with certain trends. For example, while there was Fortress Maximus, that toy had an original price tag of around $99 United States Eaglebucks, and as a result, there were maybe four or five episodes of the show that bothered to show you anything to do with Fortress Maximus despite him being basically a city they lived in.

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Story Pile: A Tail Of Love

As is tradition here on press.exe, I feel it’s important that any consideration of smooch media include something that’s complete crap. To that end, I watch a Hallmark movie, a bottomless trove of skidmarks, and I bring along Fox to talk about it with me. Since Fox needs a hook to watch a Hallmark movie, we inevitably watch a movie that is about Dogs, because you can rely on Hallmark to make dog movies that are completely bananas.

The poster for the Hallmark movie Tail of Love. It depicts two generic white people looking out at the camera, holding dogs, in front of a neutral blue background.

The Unhinged Performative Heteronormativity of Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie

Hey boy. Does your girl:

  • Change her gender presentation mid-volleyball match?
  • Demonstrate the kind of expertise in dire circumstances from a martial arts superhero story?
  • Deliberately change her gender presentation to become a perfect girl as represented in Shoujou Manga?
  • Take her rivals for your affection out on day dates where she gives her gifts and wins her prizes?
  • Flirt with your mom?

Then she’s not your girl. She’s Shikimori from Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie and I’ve just been stewing about how unhinged that series is.

Spoilers ahead!

A screencap from the anime Shikimori's not just a cutie. It shows Shikimori from the opening thinking about clothes
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Story Pile: Tomo-Chan Is A Girl!

This time last year I wrote about the at-the-time meme-of-a-show, Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie. That anime was ‘renowned’, because it had a really good trailer, and by really good I mean it made a bunch of lesbians sigh. Perhaps because it was first brought to my attention by a bunch of women saying ‘I want to be her’ or ‘I want to be hers’ I first approached that series wondering if this was going to be an ultimately unsatisfying experience for y’know, queer women. This meant I watched all thirteen episodes expecting or imagining something else was going to happen, attentive and focused for some possible insight into whatever this anime was doing that was a bit different, a bit cleverer, and in the process, I wound up really enjoying the series. I liked it, I liked the characters it showed me, I liked a lot of the jokes (even wound up sharing a few of them) and I thought it was a really good launching off point for some discussions. I still think that it’s one of the better articles I wrote last year, and part of why was because I took an anime about a subject I’m normally not interested in – romantic comedy – and gave it a fully focused, critical look.

the promo poster for Tomo-chan is a girl, showing Tomo and whats-his-name back to back. The tagline is "I may be tough but I still want to hear him say 'I love you.'"

That was the lens for Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie, and it encouraged me to try the next thing in the same genre that caught my eye, which is why I watched Tomo-Chan’s A Girl, another anime that promised to be about relationships to gender, relationships, and how difficult it can be for two completely compatible people to get over their own hang-ups and actually talk to one another about how much they want to kiss. This is a great follow-up to Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie, though, because it means now I have a point of contrast for Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie with a much, much dumber show.

Content Warning and Spoiler Warning! Tomo-Chan Is A Girl is a series that has some low-key gender feels (a woman wondering about how she can be legitimised as a woman) and some pretty lousy ways for people to talk about girls, and oh also, an incident of sexual assault in the second episode.  I’m going to spoil things in this series, as indicated by that mentioning of something from the second episode.

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Homestuck 1/2

Alright, look, I made the banner graphic let’s tear the bandaid off.

a banner in the Ranma 1/2 style that says 'Homestuck 1/2'

I make fun of Homestuck and have no intention to stop doing so, but I do so based on the series and interactions with its fans and the creator’s opinions and – look I’m not doing a good job of setting this up, this is a very meta and tortured introduction that doesn’t get to the point, and therefore, by Homestuck standards, it’s good. But what I am trying to get to is that Homestuck is a space that’s super important to people in a way that to me, an older internet denizen, rings true of the Ranma 1/2 fandom.

You know, it was a space full of romance roleplays and weird sexy exploration, and a bunch of queers used it to work themselves out and in the process learned from one another about what it meant to be queer.

I think the overlap between these spaces is a synthesis of three ideas: Isolation, Play, and Smoochiness.

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What’s Marriage For?

Marriage is a thing that’s so important to our culture and media that you’ll see it in an embarrassing quantity of everything. Setting aside media genres that are just dedicated to some version of it (and yeah, a lot of those ‘romantic’ things people are making are really just just about marriage things), there’s still stuff in our language and everyday common existence that speaks of marriage. If nothing else, consider we have a mode of address that specifies whether or not a woman is married, and asking to not be treated with that language is seen as a different dispensation. It is, to the audience of most of this conversation, a thing that The Empire tells us

What does it mean to be ‘married?’

an icon showing a pair of linked rings
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The Ranma 1/2 Subreddit is Repeating History

When you get older you start to see cycles. Things that are new and horrifying to you, later in your life, you can recontextualise those things compared to other new things. I saw the Soviet Union collapse and I saw 9/11 happen within ten years of one another, and uh, that prepared me for basically nothing. Bad example. Oh the financial crash of 2007, which led to a financial crash of, uh, you know what maybe I picked some bad examples. But you know one thing that’s cyclical in a way that can be appreciated and not a huge bummer?

Fandoms.

A screencap from the anime Ranma 1/2. It depicts Ranma, Soun, Shampoo, Ryouga and Mousse. They are just posing.

Platforms come and go and when platforms are convenient to build on, fandoms will form and reform on platforms. Old cliques and ideas be fled and new societies will bloom around the same core texts and they will always differ, they’ll always have their own varieties and peculiarities, but some things, some things will endure.

Like Ranma ½ discourse.

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Can a Bird Love A Falcon

Since last year’s Locked Tomb readings got me nostalgic and retrospective, it was only a matter of time before I retreated back to earliest media of my post-cult life, the stuff that stands tall in my mind as some of my first lessons in how to be normal. So I picked the thing with a bunch of PTSD and existential horror.

Let’s talk about the Rachel/Tobias ship.

an angular icon of a hawk

Spoiler Warning: If you’re ever planning on reading the Animorphs story, this article is going to spoil some events that happen in the last half of it. And since this is about Animorphs I guess Content Warning for war death trauma body integrity horror uh mind control uh cannibalism uh what’s the term for beating someone to death with one of your own severed limbs, that.

That.

Animorphs is a lot.

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Story Pile: D.E.B.S.

The term ‘cult classic’ gets used more than I’m comfortable with what with having been in a cult and not being considered classic by anyone, but I do think it’s important to recognise that the term has some weight. For example, this movie, D.E.B.S, pronounced ‘Debs’ is considered a cult classic of LGBTQ media. It does this in a way that if this movie came out in 2023, it would be considered a pretty funny epsiode of a TV Show, with no edge or bite to it. It looks like a pretty fun Onlyfans promotional poster. It has the overall aesthetic of The Porno Version Of Itself. D.E.B.S. is a lot of things and one of them is cheap.

A screencap from the movie D.E.B.S. It depicts the principle characters posing with guns.

But it’s also a lot of fun.

Content and Spoiler Warning: I think it’s important to say up front that despite being a pop-punk comedy movie from 2004 renowned as a ‘cult classic’ in queer communities, this is a movie that both asks and tells, and to my surprise featured just one instance of ‘oh well that didn’t age well’ in the form of an incidental drop of the r-word. I’m also going to spoil the whole movie’s plot but don’t worry if you’ve ever seen a TV Show you’ve probably already spoiled it for yourself.

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Story Pile: Afterschool Dice Club

Hey this is a blog where I tell you stories about games so what if I told you about a story that tells you stories about games? Well, would you believe there’s an entire anime in the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things genre that’s just… about games?

No no no – not videogames. Nor making videogames. Not any of those anime about MMORPGs. Not even the ones that are tie-ins to games like the Atelier or Persona or Legend of Mana anime. I mean an anime about board games. Yeah, I found one of those!

It’s really mid! And I love it!

A screencap from the anime Afterschool Dice Club showing a blue haired girl looking at a board game.
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T-Shirt: Reading Ralts

This one might not be around for long. Consider it a ‘limited run’ design. Typically speaking, anything that’s too obvious and related to Pokemon, even if you draw the art yourself, gets bumped off the Redbuble store, eventually.

A shirt depicting a Ralts pokemon, sitting in a pile of cushions, reading a book, with the catchphrase around it reading 'Do What You Want To'

Point is, I drew artwork, back in 2023, of a Ralts having a chill time reading a book, with a message I personally think of as inspiring, and put them on a shirt. This design was made for someone in particular, inspired by them, but I don’t want you to be deprived of it. I have my copy now, so I don’t need to worry about it being, like, taken down too much…

But you might want a copy of it.

Here! Check it!

Story Pile: The Traitor, Baru Cormorant

The Traitor, Baru Cormorant is an exquisitely detailed book about a queer woman from a colonised people striking out to use her wits and her brains to try and topple that empire from within, and it is written very clearly and well to explore those ideas. You spend a lot of time with Baru herself, which means if she is a character that resonates with you you get to feel her emotional state very deep and true, the constant cleverness, the non-stop backbiting of things she wants to say but won’t because it’s not part of the plan, and her emotional depths when things go badly for her. She is a character who really writes in large letters the struggles of Designed Femininity, where society has mandated a way you can be, and she has to operate within those parameters, all while rankling against them. If you’ve heard me talk about living a life under surveillance, Baru Cormorant is a protagonist who lives that way and what she does to take command of her life. I need you to know this up front because that’s all I’m going to tell you before I start on the Spoiler Warning.

I’m not kidding. Yeah I know. I know! And I’m not even planning on spoiling much of the plot or anything. Yeah it’s that kinda book! Really! I’m going to discuss spoilers for the book, but not in the most specific of ways. Still, this is a book where being surprised is an important part of it, and if you’re the kind of person who wants to feel smarter than the book you’re reading by outwitting it, even knowing the kinds of spoilers can feel like I’m robbing you of some of your fun. I absolutely do not want to diminish the fun of anyone who aims to enjoy this book. And you might! It’s very raw, it’s very real, and it’s extremely high quality work that you should consider reading if any of that seems exciting to you.

I would really recommend reading the audio book, because a lot of the book is dialogue between two characters and I think a good audio book reader would be able to help differentiate those voices in a way that makes it easier to follow. No small part of The Traitor Baru Cormorant is people having important, ideologically loaded conversations with one another in reasonably similar character voice because they’ve almost all been trained to speak that way.

the book cover for The Traitor Baru Cormorant
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The Fastest Transformer

There are a bunch of episodes, across the entirety of Transformers media that care about being the fastest. Most series have at some point a race episode, and Transformers Animated – the best Transformers series – has two. Sometimes it’s outracing a train, sometimes it’s racing a virus, sometimes it’s just a race for a race’s sake, and sometimes it’s got an extra dose of time travel.

a screenshot from Transformers Animated episode Velocity. It shows Bumblbee racing with Blurr.

Presented with the question of it, though, I wondered: Who’s the fastest Transformer?

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Speedrunning the Hbomberguy Plagiarism Video

Plagiarism is bad. Plagiarism is Plagiarism. Plagiarism is mostly vibes.

A bunch of people you don’t need to know and may not have cared about before this conversation started all failed this vibe check.

Plagiarism is bad because it erases the work of a lot of people, who aren’t rich and successful and don’t have huge audiences.

You know about this now thanks to a guy who is successful and has a huge audience.

And Time.

A joking edit of a Hbomberguy Thumbnail from 2017 about when he and others were plagiarised on youtube. The text has been changed to read 'I definitely made this youtube thumbnail.'
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Story Pile: Appare-Ranman!

When you’re an anime fan you have the beautiful luxury of being able to talk about ridiculous ideas that most people in your normal media sphere turned into something pretty pedestrian or never really expanded on, given a level of seriousness and gravitas that allows for a truly adult-level presentation that then usually also has some banging music and maybe a great combat scene or two. Such is the case of Appare-Ranman, which is an anime that can best be summarised as ‘Wacky Racers if it was a serious crime action drama,’ and you may think they did that, it was called The Great Race and it came out in 1965, to you I must say, why are you killing my buzz here. There’s only so much room to get excited about this speedrun of an anime and by providing that example of how my opening joke isn’t actually that good you’re forcing me to present a blunt metaphor for the way that Appare-Ranman! is an anime that’s about exactly as good as this opening paragraph.

Like it starts fun. There’s definitely something fun happening here.

But wew.

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Story Pile: Godzilla Vs Megalon

Godzilla is a venerable franchise of modern cinema, that serves in its own way as part of the spine of all cinema of the 20th century. An intense, thoughtful, iconic movie with exciting special effects and a grim, painful perspective that seems informed by its relationship to  a very real place and time in history about a cultural pain. I mean that’s what informs what I know about Godzilla, which is to say, I have studied the same 1954 movie everyone else has and read the same cultural critiques from non-Japanese authors.

Since then, Godzilla, as a character, is just an icon. Godzilla signifies Godzilla. Godzilla is used in so many different ways to signify so many different things that Godzilla is less of a character with its own distinct personality and values and more a sort of genre signifier of its own. ‘Godzilla shows up’ is a way an entire genre of media works now. Godzilla was special effects movie star in the 60s, a spectacle fighter in the 70s, a kid’s cartoon icon in the 80s, a gritty reboot in the 90s and a metatextual signifier throughout the 21st century. There is a wealth and a depth to every single one of the Godzilla movies that can be put into a greater and broader context of its appearances and what it means to be a Godzilla movie.

Anyway, nuts to all that, let’s talk about Godzilla vs Megalon.

A screencap from the movie 'Godzilla vs Megalon' showing the robot Jet Jaguar waving at something offscreen.

Godzilla Vs Megalon is a 1973 film, made out of scrap parts over what you would probably consider ‘the rush season’ of a retail work period. Three weeks of filming, with upwards of months of pre-planning, script-writing, character designing and buying props from the local toy store. The whole movie was designed to be a star vehicle for Jet Jaguar, the robot in the movie, who was not named Jet Jaguar when the child that made it designed it. When they realised they didn’t have the star power they wanted in this little robot, they decided to, in a way that reused stock footage, bring in two completely unrelated ringers from a previous movie, Gigan and Godzilla, and then, they fight.

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Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Critique

I did a podcast with Fox where we looked at every Disney Animated Canon movie and got to consider what I, a millenial adult with a lifetime of brain worms from an oppressive cult thought of the Disney Animated movies that define Disney Adults and Disney Magic and the Cultural Zeitgeist and if you’re not familiar with my opinion of these, almost all these movies are terrible. I dislike them often in terms of their ideologies, their moral and ethical positions – like, not just the invisible ink elements, but often, a lot of the things in them that they very clearly, explicitly want to be true.

The big one is The Lion King.

A crop of the Lion King poster
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Decemberween ’23 — The New Music From This Year

How do you listen to new music?

I understand it’s really common for most people to listen to music in their cars or using systems like Spotify, which I don’t like and don’t drive. That’s right, I don’t like cars and I don’t drive Spotify. I listen to podcasts when I travel, usually, and I listen to music while I work at my computer, because I want something that affects my mood while I’m doing, like, this work.

Frustratingly, just because it’s usually there and ad-free, I let Youtube throw mixes at me. Then when I’ve noticed I’ve done that enough that some songs are part of my personal lexicon, I go and acquire those songs some other way, whether bandcamp (in the case of small bands) or

a volume symbol, like on a computer interface

I want to nakedly recommend an mp3 collection to you. You don’t need special software to manage it. You can just dump all your music in a great big heap and use the search function on any mp3 player you like to find the songs you want. You have paid for music, you have paid for the right to use it in different forms, spotify subscriptions are not paying artists and they are rent-seeking on things you can buy directly, or in many cases have already bought.

Anyway, here’s the stuff that I added to my mp3 collection this year.

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Decemberween ’23 — The Poorhammer Podcast

I don’t play Warhammer. I don’t have the little miniature boys, I don’t have the equipment for painting them, I don’t have the space to paint them, one of them cool little lamps for making them look good while you paint them. I can’t really identify the mechanical differences between Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar and what the point of the play experiences are and how they differ one from another. If I’m sitting down at a table with at least one friend and some miniatures and hours of investment, I’m going to play 4th edition D&D —

— the best edition of D&D —

and not the heavy metal gameplay experience that is Warhammer Of Some Variety. None of this is to say, however, that the game lacks appeal, and like a gawker on a roadside attraction, I still pay attention to the space. Mostly, however, through the podcast Poorhammer, which is about getting into the game while spending as little money as possible.

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