Tag Archives: Decemberween 2022

I did a Decemberween post a few years back on a podcast called Game Studies Study Buddies which is a great podcast about reading academic texts from the field of Games Studies, a field distinct from Game Theory, which is math, and Gameology, which doesn’t exist. It’s a good podcast, it features two twitter personalities and general gaming space wordboys, Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz, one of whom is a country boy who loves dubstep.

If the point of Decemberween is to point you to free media that you can enjoy during a time where you may be seeing other media going into big long slow downtimes, then it seems to me that this is a great time to point you at a podcast that’s something like eighty hours of long-form reading of a webcomic that is also thousands and thousands of panels long. It helps that it’s honestly a really good podcast on that topic.

I don’t want to talk too much about my opinions of Homestuck here because they’re largely negative and every time I approach something I think I’ll hate because I’ve been asked to give it a second chance it tends to go bad (not always). But what I want to talk about is the way this podcast serves to onramp the experience of Homestuck in two major ways.

First and foremost, it’s actually disciplined enough to release on a meaningful schedule while covering a meaningful quantity of the comic. It isn’t hitting dreadful schedule slippage or existence failure, goodness willing. It’s just that this is going to get through the comic in a meaningful pace and is going to include the things that are in the comic without needing to spend two hours dwelling on one small set of panels. There’s a focus to it.

Secondly, there’s no need to mystify or exalt the text while they’re reading it so you don’t get a introduction that starts with something like Homestuck is an Experience but instead a much more robust, much more clear examination of what the text is, the form it takes, the source from which it comes, and that author’s other, related works. It’s a sort of autoethnography where these two people are sharing an experience and engaging with their reactions to that experience academically.

Homestuck is a thing that happened, and we can look at that thing, and it is through these two gents talking about it in a way that was willing to go ‘oh hey, this bit is boring’ and ‘this bit is bad’ while still bringing to bear tools of textual analysis (ie, looking at what’s in the text rather than necessarily the sort of paidic experience most people seem to get about Homestuck) it makes the whole task seem a lot less arduous. I know every time I’ve considered digging through Homestuck I’ve looked at the screen of a dork in his room and gone: There are ten years of this and most of it is bad, why bother?

But Homestuck Made This World looks at it in a historical context, and don’t just tell me what they think or feel about it, they show a meaningful sourced representation of what the culture at large thought of it. It’s really inspiring as a way to handle a big, challenging text.

Who knows, maybe I’ll give an examination of Homestuck a shot.

For money.

As you get older you stop paying attention to ‘music’ in a general way. I don’t drive a car, I don’t go to parties, I tend to listen to music that’s functionally entirely under my control, and this year I have been trying to avoid streaming services for music.

This has also meant more stealing stuff, which I feel completely fine about, but it has meant stealing stuff in low quality mp3s, which of course, the person in my life who might hear them and can appreciate bad music quality doesn’t like.

Still, here’s some stuff I found this year and I like:

It’s weird how this song, which I first found on Spotify (you know, before the stealing stuff) didn’t have an album cover to me. Now it has an album cover and I can’t imagine wanting anything else. Sick, huh?

Oh man, remember when Bridget GuiltyGear dropped and we got treated to a new wave of incredibly stupid discourse? A detail easily missed in all this was that there was a new theme song with it, and most of the Guilty Gear Strive music whips (I particularly like Disaster of Passion, the theme for May), but The Town Inside Me got to stand apart of it and included an enduringly weird line that keeps popping into my head, ‘I hate the alarm clock I chose.’

Also it’s got a horns bit! I like horns bits!

This one might be blocked in your region, don’t know, can’t help ya. It’s called Orgasm Anthem by Wanuka, and it’s a really fun, poppy Japanese song you can hum along with.

We also got the OP to Chainsaw Man Kick Back, which is… a cover? Of a Morning Musume song?

And while I’m loading up on Anime themes, I also really liked Venus Line, the opening to Birdie Wing. Oh no, wait I just noticed this one does a horns bit too. I might just be really into horns in my music?

There’s still always room in my heart for ironically pop-culture engaged pop punk though, and even if I feel like Sunrise Skater Kids is the kind of band I expect to make ‘pronouns’ jokes at some point if you give them enough rope, I still like this song just because if you’re going to make fun of a character, it helps to present them the way you perceive them.

Oh, you know what else was super popular this year? 1997 Australian pop music! For reasons undisclosed at this point I’ve been doing a lot of retro listens to 90s pop music and trying to determine if there’s some inherent quality to them I don’t appreciate enough, or if maybe it’s just making my brain think I’m a teenager again.

I like this song a lot because it feels like it’s expressing a very 2020 kind of vibe about loving music but not loving music culture, and how people and anxiety are at odds with one another for how you can appreciate it.

I don’t know anything about this one but the name makes me assume it’s part of a greater operatic structure and I absolutely do not care to hear more. But I am a sucker for the jabby violins at the start.

Finally, the thing that made me decide I needed to do a post like this.

Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is a science-fiction zine album of filks made by a variety of folk and headlined by an anarchist songmaker way back in 1989. The story of how it got made is a bit interesting and cool, and maybe the vibe of it is just something that resonates with me a lot. It’s sea shanties, but it’s also science fiction, so there’s an unreality to it and there’s worldbuilding and that’s dope as hell.

And this morning as I write this, I got confirmation of something.

There are a lot of fun names on the credit list for this album of nonprofessional music. Particularly, one of the songs is written by Mercedes Lackey, which is pretty neat (as much tolerance as you have for her). But the other thing is, on a couple of these songs, there’s a chorus voice, doing bass backup for a higher front voice.

That voice is Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk.

I checked with Talsorian Games, and asked if they could confirm it was the same Mike Pondsmith. They told me yes – and they called the album a rare gem.

Hey, did you ever watch Australian mid-afternoon TV and occasionally see in some little two-to-ten minute British animations that operated around some principle that had nothing to do with anything but you watched purely as some insight into the minds of the creator. Sometimes they implied a story and sometimes they were just more about a character, to give you an idea of what the character might be, even if they weren’t necessarily telling you what they were.

Anyway,

Phew, this is haha, going to produce some out-of-season thumbnails?

I haven’t mentioned this before?

Surely I’ve mentioned this before, goddamn.

Okay, so The Worst Things For Sale is a daily-sometimes-weekly-as-I-write-this blog that is very simply just finding weird things that you can buy, usually on Amazon, and talking about them. Sometimes there’s a delightful sting of the purely scientific, where the author of the blog goes and does the (sometimes quite basic) math to point out the foolishness of the product, which can be convenient. Sometimes it just points to the product and goes: Really, look at this.

It’s a pretty cynical blog, in that it mostly points out that a lot of products that are ‘of their moment’ age poorly. Another common type of product is specific niche interests that someone is trying to capitalise on and how the people who are into that thing might wind up feeling short-shifted by the products bought for them.

The items are often hilarious out of their context, but what the blog has got going for it in a big way is that the archive is deep: you can just scroll through it, a month at a time and go through years of content while you just laugh your ass off at the variety of weird and horrifying things that some people have tried to put up on Amazon.

The people behind it also made Garbage Brain University and they’ve started a new podcast called Everything Is Real, about conspiracy theories. Uh they also make Toothpaste for Dinner and Married To The Sea and also that one chart joke about doing everything while crying I show my students and –

Look, these people make a bunch of cool stuff. Check out this one for a fun binge read.

Each year, now, as a tradition, I share a list of the ASMR artists I have discovered and engaged with throughout the year. Ostensibly, this is to promote them, but we all know that that’s not really how this works. Now I’m in the habit of doing it because I can look back at each entry and see if I’ve stayed engaged with the same artists over time. It’s a neat kind of diary!

Yeah I’m late to the party here, no I don’t care.

This channel, which I only know as mndiaye_97, because quite frankly time spent investigating all the personal details of these creators in the name of blog articles inevitably brings to my attention something that I don’t want to know and then I feel obligated to report on it, is one of those great examples of Tiktok deforming media structures. It’s a bunch of tiktok styled media, with the tools for remixing the program gives you, the awkward angled cutoff, high-speed delivery and focus on the spectacle rather than long-form detail and oh my god I’m trying to copy his speaking style, this is all one sentence isn’t it oh god how do I break out of th

Anyway, I like this channel. It’s full of animal facts. It’s fun. It’s also bleak and dark, because it’s a bunch of animal facts that in many cases, suck and are violent. But it’s still engaging as hell to me to hear about squids and octopi and the occasional weird looking things a hippo or a coyote or a donkey does. Plus I really like the way it doesn’t fixate on a Formal Presentation Style and instead it’s talking about things in a way that demonstrates mastery of a topic without complying with an idea of ‘proper’ terminology.

In October 2021, Casual Geographic mentioned ‘Thank you so much for one million!!’ and when I read that in May, they were at two million. Six months for a million subscribers, that seems a nice rate.