Pearl milk tea: Boba
Coke with peanuts: Southern boba
Date shake: Desert boba
Ramune: Forbidden boba

Yesterday I looked at my Facebook–I mean really looked at it–for the first time in years. And I felt really bad! There were these comments on pictures and birthdays from people I hadn’t communicated with in months or years. A couple of people even commented on a Facebook post I made about Other People, a webcomic I had stopped working on when I got into writing my book. It was just two people, but I hadn’t realized anyone was reading the comic, and it gave me an indescribable feeling of something akin to guilt or regret.

I don’t really like Facebook. Never did, I guess. I couldn’t say exactly why, maybe because it seemed to me to be too much like MySpace (was that how you capitalized it?), which I also did not like. But then why didn’t I like MySpace? Maybe it was the artificial-seeming way interactions between people work on these websites? Or the exceedingly uninspired UI? I don’t know. I always preferred instant messaging for virtual communication.

Tumblr is different, though. It doesn’t feel to me like a platform intended for social interaction, but rather for… stuff. Art and thoughts and memes. I just can’t imagine putting my KGSTs and KGATs on something like Facebook. They wouldn’t fit, you know? Neither would my doodles. That’s why I think it’s such a shame that the higher ups or whatever who are in charge of this website have made their decision. I feel like, even though it shouldn’t affect me directly (three of my posts were flagged, but they were very clearly not porn and when I clicked the thing to have them checked the flags went away soon after), it will certainly affect me indirectly. The website could fade into relative or even actual obscurity, assuming it survives this blunder.

The premise of Twitter is something I’ve always hated ever since I learned of its existence, specifically because the idea of limiting what you write to a short length is just insulting to the writer in me–I know, “brevity is the soul of wit”, but I feel like there’s a difference between brevity in composition and brevity in spelling. Regardless of that, I was looking at Twitter recently. I decided to maybe use it more if Tumblr dies, even though it’s not at all a good replacement.

Tomorrow I won’t be looking at Tumblr, because I heard there are other people specifically boycotting the website on that day in protest and even though I know people logging off a website will do very little it’s still a thing I support in spirit, but the day after I’ll probably come back and see what it’s like. Even though the people in charge of the website made this greed-driven decision, and I have no love for corporations and greed and all the evil that comes with that, I still want a platform to conveniently write my thoughts and show my doodles and whatever else.

“Lost at Sea” by Jeff Claassen, ~2010s(?)

Kagey Art Thoughts 44:

Jeff Claassen is a modern artist I’ve only recently encountered works from, and, as you might guess, his stuff is as weird as I usually like. I feel like his art sort of skirts the boundary between unnerving and fascinating, or maybe it is both things, you decide.

Given the title, it seems clear to me that this is an illustration of a couple at sea. Specifically, it looks like a man and woman poking their heads out of the water, which is represented by black. There’s also a fish near them with some radical-looking dorsal fin(s). One thing I find particularly interesting is the way that the humans and fish are all coming out of the water in the same way artistically–that is, it looks like they have emerged from water that has a tar-like consistency, if that makes sense. They also have very interesting expressions, as if they’re equally smug despite the fact that the humans’ predicament is possibly dire while the fish should be right at home.

Aside from the somewhat abstracted style, the colors also give the art a surreal feeling. I could imagine an animated scene with these colors, where nothing is colored as you would expect and everyone moves in a very wiggly or wavy way.

“Kill V. Maim” by Grimes, 2015

Kagey Song Thoughts 13:

Grimes is an artist who needs no introduction today. I mean, I feel like my song thoughts have been half really obscure and half really well-known artists, and Grimes isn’t necessarily as well-known as the aforementioned well-known half, but I think she’s particularly popular for modern music that I listen to.

Anyway, this is the first Grimes song I’ve heard. It’s weird, like many songs I enjoy, and it’s probably my favorite of her songs (though there is at least one other contender). Musically, it sort of moves around in a way that is both consistent and inconsistent to me, which isn’t a thing I explained well but whatever.

It sounds to be about a mobster who gets into fights but also gets out of jail because he(?) has “friends in high places”, but it also sounds like there’s a bit more to it that is harder to fully interpret. Apparently, according to Grimes herself, the song is from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather series. “Except he’s a vampire who can switch gender and travel through space.”

Interesting.

Jasmine: “You’re mocking my teeth!”

Me: “No! I’m enjoying your teeth!”

Jasmine: “That’s creepy. It sounds like you’re from that Cake Bake Betty song.”

Me: “Which one? She has a lot of songs about teeth. In fact, she has a whole album called ‘Songs About Teeth’.”

Jasmine: “Huh. Five ninety-nine wine.”

Me: “Five winety-wine.”

Jasmine: “Okay.”

Me: “I am on fire tonight.”

Jasmine: “No, you’re really not.”

“Destruction” by Joywave, 2015

Kagey Song Thoughts 12:

Will the soundtrack kindly produce a sound?

Joywave is a somewhat obscure indie rock band that Jasmine got a little bit obsessed with relatively recently. We’ve been to four of their concerts within a recent two-month period, which might not be a lot to some people but to me it’s definitely a lot. It’s not one of my favorite bands, but I’m quite the fan of a few of their songs, and this one in particular is my favorite.

In my mind, the song is a bit of a meme to the band and its fans. At the end of last two concerts we went to, Daniel Armbruster (the singer) stated that “this was their last song” and proceeded to play “Tongues”, possibly my second-favorite of theirs, but then had a “technical malfunction” that interrupted the song. The apparent malfunction was remedied when Armbruster pressed a panel labeled “DESTRUCTION”, at which point that song began to play instead. The band also released the album “SWISH”, which contains the song Destruction nine times.

As for the meaning of the song, I can’t really say. It vaguely seems to me to be a song wherein the singer is generally destructive, causing trouble for the people around him, but the details of the scenario are unclear to me. Also, as in a few of Joywave’s songs, the song has Disney audio in it for some reason–in this case, a bit from Fantasia’s intermission segment.

My favorite part of the song is the guitar solo toward the end. I like when songs have reprises of prior parts within themselves, but with additions to them. It’s not easy to explain but if you listen you should hear it.

“Hope” by Ricardo Cavolo, 2017

Kagey Art Thoughts 43:

I want to note that I’m only mostly certain about the name, as there seems to be another Cavolo piece called “Hope”, and I’m only assuming the date because of the number in the signature.

Ricardo Cavolo is another modern artist whose art tends to have a distinctive recurring element, eyes. I’ve noticed that I tend to like eyes in art in several cases, as in works by Charlotte Skifstad, Remedios Varo, and Erin. So Cavolo is yet another one.

From what I can tell, Cavolo’s art is usually more elaborate than this, which is a very simplistic piece of art. It depicts what seems to me to be stylized one-eyed star-like fireball (firestar?) flying through the air, used as a design element for a flag. The name “hope” implies that this is representative of hope, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. A star flying through the air would make me think of “freedom” first, but “hope” isn’t far off in my emotional landscape, especially when an eye is involved. Actually, I just realized, you could argue this is a “shooting star”, which is definitely a hopeful symbol to many people, so there you go.

snakestack:

kuteragenesis: I’m sorry Erin I’m not weeaboo enough to know what you’re talking about.

I can’t believe after all this time you have finally chosen this moment to dunk on me KG

Sometimes…. I’m just slow.

“Nowhere Man” by the Beatles, 1965

Kagey Song Thoughts 11:

The Beatles are perhaps the biggest band that I know of, and I imagine more people know of them than any other band. As with Pink Floyd, my primary and initial experience with the Beatles is from a movie. In this case, the movie is the Yellow Submarine, a fun and silly animated movie I was quite a fan of as a kid. Almost all of the Beatles’ music I know is from this movie, including Nowhere Man.

Spoilers, this song plays when the Beatles meet this guy. When I watched the movie, I always thought the “Jeremy”, “Hillary”, “Boob”, “Ph.D.” were not the entirety of the character’s name, but random “names” that he picked out of nothing because he didn’t have a real name. Apparently they are in fact his name but I like my supposition better. Anyway they find this strange character who lives in what is apparently actually “nowhere”, and they decide to be really rude and sing about how nothing he does has any meaning or purpose.

Of course, the song wasn’t made for this “nowhere man”, and it existed before the movie was made. According to Wikipedia, it was a song that John Lennon wrote about himself, which gives it a very different feeling, I think, if you listen to it with that in mind.

It’s a somewhat sad song, or at least melancholic, but it’s also kind of “fun” in that Beatles way. It’s a good one.

Apocalyptic landscapes, courtesy of the smoggy clouds over the state.

Thanksgiving food I had with Jasmine’s parents. All vegetarian, all good. Jasmine’s dad makes great Quorn roast, and Jasmine is the master of apple pie. I’m also fond of the stuffing I made.

“Ogres… are like onions!”
(Sniff.) “They stink?”
“Yes- No.”
“Or they make you cry?”
“No!”
“Or if you leave them out in the sun, they get all brown and start sprouting little white hairs?”
“No! Layers! Onions. Have. Layers. Ogres have layers! Onions have layers… You get it. We both have layers.”
“Ohh. You both have lay-ers. You know, not everybody likes onions… Cake! Everyone likes cake! Cakes have layers!”
“I don’t care what everyone likes! Ogres are not like cakes.”
“You know what else everyone likes? Parfaits. You ever meet someone and say, ‘Hey, let’s get some parfait.’ and they say, ‘Hell no, I don’t like no parfait.’? Parfaits are delicious.”