Story Pile: Person Of Interest, Season 1
In my teenager years, I came to appreciate the block of TV shows I thought of as ‘good shows’ in the 7:30 to 8:30 bracket. This typically took the form of a pair of back-to-back sitcom episodes, or, as I got older and the options got better (and my bedtime crept back), an hour long dramedy TV series, often built around a single high-concept hook, or even taped from late-night TV. A lot of these shows were, to my mind, ‘American Shows’ (and therefore good shows), were typically high-concept shows with sci-fi ideas in them that could be executed on cheaply with a small special effects budget, and included things like Time Trax and Pointman and, strangely important in my mind, a series called Fortune Hunter. I liked to refer to Fortune Hunter as a sort of example of forgettable 90s TV ephemera, a low-budget story about a wannabe James Bond type who was relaying everything through super-technology contact lenses to a nerd in a chair who could instantly relay everything to him. I, at the time, thought that Fortune Hunter was a great reference to make, like Street Sharks, which would make people in the same age range as I go ‘oh, yeah, that show, I remember that, kinda.’
Turns out that this was a terrible idea because, at the time I did not know, that Fortune Hunter aired for all of one month in America and only played out the full run of its episodes here in Australia because we were a dumping ground for failed attempted TV series that relied on high-concept sci-fi ideas that could be executed on cheaply with a small special effects budget. But those shows had some common traits, like Time Trax with its decreasing list of villains to apprehend, or Pointman with the fantasy of a strange billionaire appearing out of nowhere to save ordinary people, or Fortune Hunter with its gimmick of a super-nerd teaming up with a terrifying badass super-spy to save the day for single individuals.
I bring up this meandering reference to 90s television because these different stories with their modest production budgets and mediocre executions through actors who never quite got the respect they deserved are presented their absolute apotheosis in the form of the 2011-2016 sci-fi action series Person Of Interest.
Continue Reading →The Increasing Presence of Anime On This Blog
Around early April, late March, I made a chart to check the distribution of material I was covering in Story Pile, and then the stuff I had planned to watch. I made this chart because I realised that there were anime I was looking to cover, but I already had covered an anime in that month. And then I realised that my initial idea to keep the distribution of content varied, which was to write anime articles starting in november and work towards the current now, had kinda hit a wall, because I had already watched more than twelve anime this year.
The anime had caught up with containment.
The anime had breached.
Pride of Frankenstein
As a child I did not get much to engage with popular culture of the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t until the late 90s that I was able to watch most mainstream television or listen to music from popular media without treating it like contraband. Things that were current were suspect, things that were my father’s childhood were probably okay, and things that were old, well, they were classic.
I read a lot of old pulp. I read Sherlock Holmes and I read Robert Louis Stevenson and I read Dumas, and one afternoon, visiting my grandma, sitting on her back step, away from the conversations she had with my parents, I read Frankenstein.
I don’t think, at that age, that I read it right.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Call of The Night
This is the anime of a song. It doesn’t follow the plot of the song. It follows the vibe of a song, and that song inspired the manga, and then, the manga got made into an anime and that anime got to have the ending theme be the song that inspired it, and the same band made the opening theme, because they had already, in their music, defined this anime.
And damn if it don’t feel like a hell of a song.
T-Shirt: Trans Vegas
Hey, Talen, you do a lot with the trans flag in your designs are you trying to say something yes I am trying to say the trans flag is kickass and right now you need every bit of random reasons to make it clear to say, any trans youth around that you’re not a total shithead and if they’re afraid there’s a reason to look around and see people who care about their existence and are less likely to suddenly turn out to be a fascist anyway hey let’s look at this design it’s from Fallout New Vegas.
The design is a bit small and hard to see on a white background so I recommend if you get it you put it on something dark.
You can get it on stuff and I recommend it on a shirt or get some stickers and slap ’em places you think are cool and I like it on the pin too.
Story Pile: GGWP — Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games
What if the prettiest girl in your school who nobody knew well was so aloof, so pure, so perfect, not because she was in fact, transcendentally perfect, but because she was an utter gamer gremlin who didn’t care about anything any other student was doing, since they weren’t pulling off sick combos and trash talking noobs in ranked ladder matches? And you could tell because you were an expert in the same kind of games, and now she wanted to fight you? To fight you? To fight you? To stay up late and fight you?
And you were both girls?
That’s the story of Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, which is a manga series about exactly what I just described. This is a Japanese story about a Japanese sector of life – about the pressures of school and the intensity of hobbies you wind up with if you have to have them in secret. It’s about social pressures on women, it’s about what is or isn’t acceptable for people to do and how an invisible online persona creates a space for people to become what they truly want.
It is also full of some of the sickest reaction panels of a girl power-posing over an opponent who isn’t even in the room I’ve ever seen in manga.
Continue Reading →Hanamusa, Explained
There is a nonzero chance if you follow me on tumblr, you’ve seen the term ‘Hanamusa’ attached to something I shared. It’s probably also some super cute art of Delia Ketchum and Jessie Teamrocket, and you may wonder what is going on and also, why is there so much good art of this.
Hanamusa as a term derives from the Japanese names of the characters – Hanako and Musashi. If you’re into shipping name structures, Hana-Musa implies that Hanako is the seme and Musashi the uke, but I don’t think that holds for all use cases of the type of terminology. It’s a ship. It’s an AU ship, as in an ‘alternate universe’ ship, where the two characters are presented in a context outside of the normal context of the anime presentation of them.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Sword Art Online Alternate Gun Gale Story
Well, I’ve been putting it off enough. I think you’re old enough to know.
There’s this anime called Sword Art Online.
The Seemingly Sudden And Impressive Presence of Actually Queer Anime Circa Right Now
Hey, do you know what I mean by ‘this user can say it?’
I want to say it’s a cohost meme but the idea is that there are some words that get treated as cursed or slurs or dangerous magical words that are reclaimed slurs, in the mouths of people who can reclaim them. Simply put, if I, a bi dude, want to make a joke where I use the word faggot, fuck off telling me I shouldn’t. And this led to the joke that ‘This User Can Say It’ was a flag that signalled that whether or not an individual wanted to out themselves in any specific way, they had the rights to use particular terms.
But I’m not here to talk about slurs I’m here to talk about anime. It should be no surprise to anyone who pays attention to the trends on this blog (so, Tab, gotyaoi, me) that there’s a low key anxiety about doing too much on this blog about too many anime. It wasn’t intentional but I’ve just been watching more this year and that means more of this year has been talking about anime.
Here then is a list of anime that won’t show up in the Story Pile, but absolutely Can Say It.
Continue Reading →Wreck It Ralph Is About Trans Women In Sport
Hey, did you already listen to the Wreck It Ralph episode of The Disney Animated Canonball, a podcast where I, Talen Lee (he him) and not-appearing-in-this-post Fox Lee (she her), watched all of the Disney Animated Canon movies? If no, then keep going and you should maybe check it out later because it was a big project, watching and podcasting about 54 movies, of which upwards of five were movies I think are any good, and that there, that’s Disney magic, baybee, but if you have then this is going to sound like a rerun.
In case you don’t remember, Wreck It Ralph is an awful film.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Harrow The Ninth
Harrow The Ninth is the second book in the four-and-a-half-book-so-far Locked Tomb trilogy by Tamsyn Muir, a New Zealand author, and to get the box blurb copy out of the way early, it’s as intricate as wristbones, multi-layered, wrought out of several kinds of deliberate excellence and also extremely bloody funny. It commands its venaculars and surgical terminology alongside one another to construct a narrative puzzlebox of regrets and rage and guilt and violence and queer shit and I loved it.
There are these healing moments of emotionally satisfying contact between people who you can maybe let your guard down and like because they don’t have to suck just because this situation sucks and maybe that’s the important thing, maybe it’s the friends we made along the way. Or maybe it’s really, really not. You’d have to get to the end of the book to start to find out what you think. I know what I think.
Now, it is a slight problem that Harrow The Ninth is a book that builds directly on the previous book, which is a book with a very distinct conclusion that leaves you wondering ‘okay, now how does this proceed,’ and Harrow The Ninth doesn’t actually give you easy answers. As a matter of simple necessity, then, and in order to discuss ideas in this book and why I love it, I am going to talk – even a bit obliquely – about the stuff in the book. Therefore, if you’re the kind of person who wants them, I put here, a SPOILER WARNING.
And you may think ‘oh come on, it’s a book with a twist, you can talk about stuff around that,’ and like kinda no not really, it’s way more complex than that, and even just telling you that is enough to make the wrong kind of mind leap at shadows thinking every single thing you deal with in the book is The Twist. Good news, though, because in this situation, oh natively paranoid, must-not-be-surprised, solve-it-first readers, you’re right!
Everything in this book is The Twist.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: 15 Minutes
Way back when I wrote about The Beginner’s Guide, I wound up talking about a movie called S1M0N3. The basics of that article are that some gamers seemed to be fooled into believing the fictional story of a developer stealing work and putting it up on the internet for sale was a real thing, just as in the movie S1M0N3 people believed that a movie about a fake fictional digital actress was made with a real fictional digital actress. It still stands out to me as an example of the way that modern, immediate anxieties about our relationship to technology are not, in fact, new at all.
In 2001, another movie came out that had a similar vibe to it, a movie about a fear of the changing culture of the now in the light of emergent technology. The fear was about what people would do in a world where everyone had access to a camera, about what a culture of news of spectacle would do, and the assumptions we make about people’s ability to control and express themselves. The movie was called 15 Minutes.
Shirt 23.05 — Haru-Ni ’06
Anime in my mind comes in strata. Different ages, different things that made significant changes to the landscape of anime. Things that feel contemporary weren’t, because I got to watch them at the same time. Things that were contemporary didn’t seem to be to me because I missed one. And in 2006, there were two different anime that shook my world launched – and I didn’t enjoy either of them until they were years old, unaware that the impact they had was nearly simultaneous.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a really great series that I should write about sometime, and Ouran High School Host Club, an equally excellent anime that made a lot of millenials grapple with being gay or girls or gay girls, both hit in April 2006. They were important in ways it was hard to explain, and even now they’re both handy touchstones where you can point to them to just open conversations about anime of that time. They, in a way, ruled the world.
And they both had main characters named Haruhi.
Here, then, I present stickers for you to show which you support in their quest to take over the world of anime as of 2006. If you’d like them, you can get them, with Haruhi Suzumiya as the Presidential runner, or with Haruhi Fujioka as the Presidential runner.
Story Pile: My Hero Academia, Season 5
Here we are, five years of watching into the story that is My Hero Academia, a story that took two seasons to get up to gear and then ran face-first into a pandemic making every part of its production slow and awkward and worse but don’t worry, they had a whole manga to build off. Which means that while the execution may suffer, there was at least a solid, robust spine of storytelling to build off.
Right?
Spoilers ahoy!
Continue Reading →Hollow Boys
There’s this anime, Love After World Domination that, once again, was an anime from the 2022 season of absolute banger anime, and it was funny and it looked nice and it delved into a familiar trope space and it had a good comic timing and its protagonist, Desumi Loveafterworlddomination was extremely cute and gifed up well and also dressed like what I can only describe as a horny skeleton bunny girl dominatrix, so in the context of is it a good show to watch it pretty easily sat above things that looked bad and weren’t funny. It was described as a romantic comedy, and occasionally, you’d see people talk about it in the context of having a good pair of romantic leads and how it had two protagonists and how they had good chemistry and this is a lie. There are no leads, there are no protagonists, plural. There’s Desumi, and it is a show about Desumi, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because Desumi is extremely cute and sweet and funny and hot and I bet you could catch genders off her.
The beef I have with this series, and why I never bothered to do anything Story Pile about it, is because half of the core of the show isn’t there.
Story Pile: The Johnny Series
I reread the Johnny Maxwell books by Terry Pratchett, from the early 90s, and this time I had Fox along to help. Then, we talked about it and brought along a microphone so you can listen to us talking about these books.
Story Pile: My Hero Academia, Season 4
Alright, now we’ve hit our stride, we’ve done most of the set-up stuff required to have stories and character information all out there. The major characters are all laid out, we have a villain on the horizon waiting to happen to people, and we just had an introduction of some new boundary characters, so it’s time to immediately do something with all of those. This is a series that has got a handle on the basic ideas of what it’s going to do, and each season can be snapped apart into a few short story arcs you can consider on their own.
There’s something to the experience of enjoying My Hero Academia, season to season. It’s got all the joy of a catchy pop song, popcorn playful and full of classic shonen anime battle feelings, but this pop song also includes a few slurs? And probably says something condescending about women. Basically, I’m enjoying it but I’m sure as hell not going to defend it.
What we get in this season is some high drama with a big battle, one of those stories that focus on the characters in the setting dicking around with the infrastructure that exists to deal with the commonality of superpowers, and then an absolute top-tier banger of a story arc about excellent nearly-zero-stakes hero bullshit.
I’m going to talk more about it and that’s going to involve spoilers, so, below the fold!
Why Do Droids Scream?
In the Star Wars universe, there’s a class of characters known as droids. They’re robots, manufactured, created, bought and sold. They are also entirely capable of sentience, complex tasks, and, most importantly, they can feel pain, distress, and anxiety. There is at no point in any of the Star Wars media I have seen
— which, considering my antipathy towards the entire franchise, is a lot —
do we get a meaningful description of why these droids are the way they are. I’ve been told that R2D2 is the way it is because it’s gone without being wiped periodically, which doesn’t really help things in any way. ‘Cos if R2D2 develops an advanced personality and his own peculiarities if he’s not wiped then that means that all the other droids in the world are just these nascent individuals, building an identity that is then actively suppressed by the people who can buy and sell them, and do, and scrap them when they fail to provide adequate utility.
Story Pile: The Owl House Finale
Chances are good you already know what The Owl House is, and chances are even better, you’ve already seen the finale trilogy of episodes if you’re reading this. If you’re not, however, and if you’re just one of the people who likes hearing me talk about kid’s cartoons that you don’t watch, though, or if you’ve been holding back out of fear that the show’s conclusion is bad, I have good news! It’s good, I liked it, it’s charming and it’s very sweet and there’s a good conclusion that shows a respect for the stakes of the situation while also not closing the door on more stories for the characters you’re familiar with.
Basically, it’s a good ending and I liked it and it didn’t diminish my appreciation for the show. It plays fair, is I guess what I’d say. If what you’re looking for is someone to tell you you’re not getting your hopes up for no reason to set aside the time to watch it, yeah, it’s great!
Now let’s go a little more in-depth on the three episodes. This is your Spoiler Warning.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Gideon The Ninth
Here’s the pitch; it’s a sci-fantasy magi-tech murder mystery story with sword fights and a ripped up muscle lesbian who wears makeup to look like a skull and mirrored sunglasses to look like a skull wearing mirrored sunglasses. Then with that kind of approach you’re left grappling with the question, okay, but how does it pull that off?
And the answer is with bombast and aplomb, two words that I think wouldn’t rate for this book’s love of linguistic particulars.
The PC Format Archives
Hey, c’mere, I wanna show you something.
We Don’t Need An Animorphs Reboot
It seems that every time a piece of nerd media comes out, other people in other nerd media spaces surface declaring that now, now is the time that our nerd media thing is ready to strike while the iron is hot. It doesn’t matter how unrelated it is. One of those spaces where I think I comfortably belong is the Animorphs fandom, even if I think I must come across as being so utterly negative all the time.
Whatever the current context, there’s always some reason that now, here, Animorphs is due a comeback. With the backlash against Hogwarts Legacy, there was a push that hey, now, now is a great time for us to make sure our Young Adult Fiction media property from the last millenium gets to take prominence and become the new thing everyone talks about with its own theme park! Then it was Goncharov, where the sudden thirst for creative element that encouraged people being able to make new Animorphs books and pretend they were always part of the canon as a great way to tap into that community! And then most recently, the fact there’s shapeshifting in the Dungeons & Dragons movie and an actor who’s a jerk —
Why, this movie is proof that we could totally have a great, successful, reboot movie for the Animorphs! You know, a movie! For that set of forty plus books!
Problem: This is completely unfeasible.
Continue Reading →Pitch: Development Issues
You know for all that this blog is a space to put down my own creative work, it’s kind of shocking how ill-equipped it is to talk about things I can’t do. I do board games and card games and talk about RPGs and anime and media and a lot of being angry about fundamentalist christianity, but there are rare times when there’s other stuff that interests me as well. Remember that one time I presented some recipes? What about the occasional outbursts of flag threads?
Here’s something I don’t think I’d ever have the means to make, then: I’ve been thinking about web shows.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Summer Time Rendering
2022 was a kind of terrifying year for anime.
Terrifying in the scope, the variety and the general quality, mind you. It was still a year with a bunch of movies and continuations of things I don’t care about, and it was also a year in which the anime industry kept reeling after literal terrorism and the results of a pandemic slowdown. Still, the thing is, even when you take that into account and also the burnout and stress the anime producers are under, 2022 was a year with a selection of anime that would, in a less busy year, be considered the best anime released that year.
You doubt me? Well, consider that across 2022, we got heavy-hitter franchise installations Spy X Family, Demon Slayer, Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War, Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War, Ascendance Of A Bookworm and the final season of Attack On Titan. There were also some pretty remarkable releases in the queer media space, with a mainline yuri production The Executioner And Her Way Of Life pushing into the isekai franchise space and The Witch From Mercury taking the lead of probably the venerable anime franchise machine that is Gundam. Looking at the lighter, shorter series, things that didn’t need a big backing from a big studio to get out the door, we got shows all over the genre space like Ya Boy Kongming, Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie, My Dress Up Darling, Akiba Maid War, Fuuto PI, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, Lycoris Recoil, Call Of The Night, Bocchi The Rock, Do It Yourself, Urusei Yatsuara, and oh yeah, did I mention Chainsaw Man up top because yeah, Chainsaw Man also came out in 2022.
That’s… one year. Any of those 21 series would be an all-star excellent show to be ‘the one great one’ of the year. For comparison, in 1993, when I think I can say I started really paying attention to anime (we called it Japanimation), there were twenty four anime series made at all.
And I bring this list to your attention, the scope, and the weight of that scope and hopefully also the number of highlighted links showing that hey, yeah, these aren’t just critically praised or noteworthy shows but shows I like, where I want to tell you about the anime that gets to be 22 on that list, and may, in my opinion, be the best one.
Summer Time Rendering is a 2022 anime based on the Shonen Jump+ Digital Manga series written and illustrated by Yasuki Tanaka who at least according to wikipedia has done nothing else. The TV adaptation is by OLM, long-standing anime industry juggernauts responsible for, amongst everything else, Inazuma Eleven, Yo-Kai Watch, Beyblade, Cardfight Vanguard, and, of course, the entire run of the Pokemon anime, amongst other less kid-oriented fare like Komi Can’t Communicate and Life With An Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated Into A Total Fantasy Knockout so we can mention an isekai genderswap anime as well, for the full bingo. As to what Summer Time Rendering is at its heart, is a mystery story, which makes it kind of challenging to talk about in a way that can both illuminate its virtues without dispelling some of the tension that people like to discover themselves, especially since one major component of the story is a time loop,
Shirt 23.04 — Can’t Lose
I need very little encouragement to make some things. Over on my Patreon (where you can sign up for as little as a buck to give my brain good chemicals), I suggested this shirt design as a potential one for this month. One person went ‘I like it,’ and so I went and did it.
I was aiming at evoking a university sports team logo (which I looked at a lot of) and the DOOM logo from 1993 (which I also looked at a lot of, but for different reasons). This design involved learning a lot of things about how to make 3d-looking shaped text, which is how I got this eventual ‘curving’ effect — it involves the Lens Distortion tool in GIMP.
The popped text above and below the logo was made first in a vector program and then also made 3d in GIMP, too. Honestly, looking at this piece I’m pretty proud of how many pieces of this involved developing or refining a new skill to do something, or built on a skill I’ve gotten so used to I didn’t even conspicuously think of it.
I kinda want to get a hoodie or coffee mug with this on it for my dad but I think he, a preacher, might balk at the actual pentagram.
Anyway, you can get this design in black star or white star versions.
Story Pile: Lycoris Recoil
Lycoris Recoil is a 2022 action thriller anime about a pair of girls working to prevent terror attacks in Tokyo, while they get to know one another and become ＧＯＯＤ ＦＲＩＥＮＤＳ, while a plot happens around them. You know the type, right?
I am going to talk about things all through the series, I am going to spoil major twists, I am going to Talk About This Show. This serves as a spoiler warning, but also a content warning; this is a show that features guns, lots of guns, police shootings, medical tension, terrorism, bad dads, and dead probably-gays. It’s an action thriller anime set in a terrorism-wracked Japan, don’t imagine you’re getting something else just because there are girls on the posters.
Values of A Dollar — The Confederacy’s Currency
Hey, the Confederate States Of America were a racist slave state that was founded in the name of maintaining a white supremacist state forever, and its eventual fall was a moral good. But don’t worry, while that state existed, they also made a bunch of shitty, self-glorifying art that even when it’s technically well crafted, is all built out of a fascist, white supremacist ideology that was so bad and so obviously evil that even The United States was their moral superior. Whatever aesthetic value their culture has is, like the art of Rhodesia, entirely predicated on them being a nation whose significance in modern culture is entirely about clinging to an ideology of racism, and you do not, in fact, got to hand it to them.
Anyway, I think that sets the tone right.
I have said, many times, that your culture’s money is probably the most commonly reproduced piece of art your culture makes in your name. It is the ideology of a nation, in its most common piece of civic art, art that’s meant to represent who you are and what you value, and that’s why it’s meaningful to care about what it depicts. I’ve said that the United States currency is some of the worst, both in term of its accessibility, but also its devotion to depicting nothing but the institution of its own governance from a very narrow window of time. Basically, US money depicts nothing as much as it depicts the importance of a small handful of people who maintained and operated the mechanisms of creating the country of America.
They still have Andrew Jackson on a bill and they’ve had seven years to put Harriet Tubman on a bill, and that hasn’t moved past prototype stages, so you can see how important it is to the people making choices.
But that’s America America; what about America America America, the America that insists it’s even more America than America America? What did the Confederacy put on their money?
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Unseen Academicals
When considering the Discworld series of books, it seems at times that it’d be almost boring for me to discuss them, because they’ve been so important to my personal history and interests that it’d be a bit like ‘oh, hey, this thing I like, but obviously I would, wouldn’t I, because I’m that basic that I kind of got my personality from a series of fantasy novels.’ Every single one of the books that I love, I can almost hold up and say ‘this book was basically written for me, as a person,’ given my interests. And if I could pick the one Discworld book to hold up as an example of me in a book, the things and ideas and experiences that all hold together for me, I think there are definitely books that I think of as cooler and better and having amazing moments and important lines in them. I could name Men at Arms with its maxim that a good man will kill you without a word. I could name Hogfather with its line you have to believe in the small things that don’t exist. I bet I could look stylish as hell if I could invoke Feet of Clay‘s maxim that all days are holy or none are or Monstrous Regiment and you are my little lambs, so many cool lines that would flatter my ego to talk about how this book is a good insight into me.
But there’s a Discworld book that kinda, without meaning, hits me with both barrels, reveals a second shotgun, fires another pair of barrels, and then reloads both of them again.
Hi.
This is me, pretty much.
SPOILERS after the fold.
Continue Reading →Bob Ross’ Basilisk
I’m glad I didn’t rush into this conversation.
This is about generative art, using predictive models, which you might hear lumped together as ‘AI art’ these days. I don’t want to use that term for it (though, you know, no promises I don’t mess up and do that), and I don’t want to fall into the trap of that, of treating it like ‘an artificial intelligence.’ It’s not. The term I use for it is Generative Art, which media you can feed into a machine, and then make that machine spit out results based on composing those pieces.
There are two big reasons to use this term instead of ‘AI art.’ The first is that it’s just not AI. AI implies an intelligence, which this absolutely is not and cannot be. There cannot be intention behind the accumulated behaviour of a statistical average. Calling it AI is a cloak thrown over a system – a very clever system! – that’s able to divine fuzzy trends in how people sort and categorise things. The other thing is that calling it generative art connects it to previously generative art – institutions of technological systems designed to make artistic forms in a way that complicates the intention of the artist. This is a tradition that reaches back a long way, and sure, it includes things like these generative art systems, but also random graphical output demos on disks back in the 90s, noise generators in Photoshop, messy blurs, picrews, and even things like tie-die art, and when you can put them in that context, you’re going to be able to extract it from a lot of hype about it, both positively and negatively.
Let’s talk about it, then.
Story Pile: My Hero Academia, Season 3
Finally I’m having a good time
Shirt 23.03 – Sandy Hook Monday
When you engage in a work of satirical criticism, you need to approach it with a clarity of purpose that indicates to your audience the moral framework with which you do it, so that at no point it can be construed as uncritical support for the thing you are satirising, even moreso when contending with media designed to be consumed extremely quickly and uncritically. This is on my mind as I put a lot of work into how to draw a stupid cartoon of Alex Jones as a Garfield character, who absolutely sucks.
I made this design to be a sticker. Alex Jones makes a bunch of stuff in the form of stickers, things you can place around the world to direct attention towards his shitty advertising stream. Alex Jones, let me be clear, is an abusive cult leader who is trying to exploit en masse a community that he also never wants to interact with. Right now, he’s clocking on with a tediousness that speaks of the ‘hilarious’ office garfield strips about hating mondays, and that was the genesis of this design. He sucks, and he’s banal, and the things about him that suck are also pathetic.
This design didn’t feature the background at first. The ‘Hate mon days’ logo used to be ‘HATE ‘MON DAYS,’ as in ‘hate them on days.’ There didn’t used to be as many stackies of paper, nor the big Sandy Hook bill. But I had to add to it to try and make sure it didn’t just look like I was at best neutral about how much this guy sucks.
I’m proud of it, I think it looks unmistakably like Alex Jones if you’re familiar with him, and if you want, you can have it as a sticker, a pin, a shirt, a hat, a coffee mug, or even a magnet!