My LGBTQIA+ Cards

 Damn, look at all these little ID cards I have in my pocket! This is all typed out so you can't see them. Ha ha ha ha! You fucking wish. But hey, I'm going to talk about this. I've been out of Closetville for a while. I'm just going to put this out somewhere because I feel like it. I talk about being queer on stream sometimes but I rarely go on a whole rant about it.

tl;dr:
My pronouns are they/them and she/her.
My gender is non-binary but I'm okay with feminine labels (i.e. girl, woman, chick, bitch).
My sexual identity is polysexual.

Pronouns

I use they/them and she/her. I must say that "they" has quickly grown on me since I came out as non-binary. A lot of my close friends started referring to me as "they" without me explicitly asking them to. Some friends I still very much like and respect refer to me as "they". I refer to myself with they/them  or she/her pronouns. I especially use she/her on odd occasions when I put in more than fifteen minutes into outfits, makeup, and hair. I also do this when I draw my little avatar fucker in more feminine outfits. Like "damn, look at her!" That's pretty much it. Nobody fucking calls me "she" but you can if you want and it isn't fucked up.

Gender

I'm non-binary! Ain't that somethin'? I am transfem, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, all that stuff. So originally I liked the concept of having many elements of masculinity, androgyny, and femininity encompassing my identity. Now that I have been out for a while and most of the people I meet just treat me like a man despite wearing obvious make-up and a decent amount of women's clothing, I'm kind of over it. I don't get offended or upset by feminine labels. I definitely don't get offended by gender-neutral labels. I originally didn't care about masculine labels but now I don't like them. Not only do a lot of people still just treat me like a man, but most of them also treat me like a straight, cis man. When your gender identity is a lot of things and not an exclusion of things, it is kind of hard to say "well, actually I don't like that". The question is always "what do I replace calling you BRO with then?" Why? I don't know or care. That's just the way it goes. So I just have to take it and be miffed a little bit. It's just easier.

So uh, try to refrain from calling me bro, man, dude, or sir. Especially "sir". I don't know what it is about "sir". You're trying to show innate respect or something completely discounting that I barely look like a sir. I just have a big upper lip and a long-ass face. Like. I'm on HRT. I have tits. What do these punks want from me, y'know?

Anyway. Yeah. Enby. Also, calling me an enby is great. It's totally fine. Some people that aren't non-binary think that "enby" is like the n-word of non-binary people or something. Not that extreme but same basic concept. It's not that deep. It's really easy and cool to use.

Sexuality

Polysexual. Not many understand what this is. It took me so many years to find this and what it actually means. So polysexuality is close to pansexuality. So imagine a bunch of solo cups, right? Each one has marker on it that shows what gender the cup is. So like a gay dude might just throw a ping-pong ball into the "men" cup. A pansexual person will say "give me all these fucking ping-pong balls you motherfucker" and throw one into each cup. A polysexual person like myself might throw a ball into each cup and then say "uh... actually hang on". Then I'll take a few out. For me, it's the "men" cup. That one's pretty damn empty. That's basically where I'm at.

I can't see myself fooling around with men. I have tried to imagine it and it just doesn't work. It simply exists as a fantasy. Like Pan's Labyrinth but sexual. When I think about enbies and women in that same vein, it's a much different sensation that I simply don't get with men.

"Um, okay? Thanks???"

So I get three flags. The trans one, the polysexual one, and the non-binary one. Technically, I probably get more than that, like the genderqueer one but those are the three where I'm like "ah, yeah okay, those are the ones that I fit into". That's pretty much it. Just kind of sitting here wanting to type something and this is the something I typed.

What does this mean for you? Don't be discouraged not being able to find what label you can put on yourself right away. Don't be discouraged if the criteria for a label you thought you found ends up changing. I once thought because I can see what people attracted to men see in some men to some extent that I was bisexual because it was one of the only sexual identifiers I was aware of. I never really identified as that though because it didn't really seem all that accurate. I also told a few people "I might as well be a lesbian at a certain point". Gee, I wonder what would have led me to that conclusion. Maybe it was being born in the wrong fucking body and being raised to believe that anyone who wasn't cis or straight was psychologically deranged. Just spitballing. Don't be down on yourself for not having one concrete answer to sexuality or gender. Sometimes yours will change later anyway because people change over time. You were always born as yourself. "You" should just be an umbrella term that works for everyone. It isn't your fault that this term isn't good enough for a lot of salty people. Maybe you already found your identity cards. That's pretty rad too.

I've got a debatable pile of the L, a dash of the G, I guess a dash of the B, at least 156mg daily of the T, and decent fucking loads of the Q and the "+"! Cool. That's the conclusion of my blog post. "Cool."

Shoving Music Down Your Throat [2021 Edition]

 here we go again

Shoving Music Down Your Throat is a thing I do every year where I talk about music I listened to over the course of the year. I gush about the top ten albums that really struck me, trying to keep it to one per artist (because one of these was the year I got into Dir En Grey and that band took up like a third of the event). Beyond that, there's not much of a prerequisite. The albums don't even have to be from the current year. In fact, they usually aren't. In the case of this year, the only current-year album is MASS by The Gazette. Yes, I did actually listen to Lorde's new album. I probably won't go out of my way to ever listen to it again but I also don't think it's bad. People freaking the fuck out calling being an abomination of an album need to take a deep breath and listen to as much AFI as I have, then go back and give Solar Power a fucking spin. You'll be kissing Lorde's very apparent ass after that new trial of perspective, I bet.

The albums are in chronological order.

Here's a link to the playlist I made for the 2021 Edition of Shoving Music Down Your Throat. I pick a song from each of these albums to put on the playlist. These songs aren't always my favorites from each respective album. They are usually just the ones that are either the one I think is the most accessible to the most people or the one that illustrates a specific point I brought up about it the best. Sometimes these things overlap.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5z5urWxz7jN0uDpgoC6NDt?si=20da13d7da344293

I was working on my own music more often this year so I didn't get to listen to as much different stuff as I have since starting Shoving Music Down Your Throat years ago. For what it's worth, these were not the mere 10 albums I listened to. I definitely took in more than that, just not as much as I might have wanted to.

Faces by Earth, Wind, & Fire [1980]
genre: R&B, funk

I have now listened to a decent handful of Earth, Wind, & Fire and must say: the hype is real. It's honestly hard to go wrong with this band. I do recall listening to an album that came out in 2000-something that I didn't like but I cannot fish out which one it was. For all you know, that album is great too. It had cover art that looked like a Journey album but you could argue that for like 5 EW&F albums. This year for whatever reason, I decided to listen to a few more. I finally got around to listening to All 'n All which is one of the "big" ones, I guess. It was really good but I feel like anyone interested in funk is already aware that All 'n All slaps bounding ass or should be aware if they aren't yet. So I'm going to talk about Faces because this one's also really good. Most of my EW&F experience so far has been 70s stuff and Faces starts their 80s stint. I was kind of scared because I feel like most bands seem to drastically change their style up in the midst of a new decade for some reason. That or they laughably stagnate. Faces sounds different enough but still has a lot of stuff that makes the previous few albums great too. I lack the language to efficiently articulate what separates Faces from all of their 70s stuff that makes it noteworthy. I *can* say that the main reason I'm putting this on here though is because it is the album I feel is the most consistently amusing. If that sounds prudent, it would sound way more dickish trying to basically "review" the album here. Neither of us wants that to happen, right? There are moments that are either notably goofy or just feel standardized on almost every EW&F album I can think of, even on All 'n All. The high moments of the album always make up for it though. Faces is more consistently bangy though its bangiest might not bang as bangy as the bangers of other albums. Of course, this is all subjective. I just feel like most people getting into certain genres expect the spearheads to have a lot of albums with two great songs on their most popular albums with a bunch of dust bunnies lodged in the seams. Faces, I can assure you, is not like most Maroon 5 albums. This can apply to a lot of bands and albums, I just thought I'd get a quick dig in. It's not cute but what's done is done. I could edit it. I could backspace it right now. That said, we're moving on.

Raoul and the Kings of Spain by Tears for Fears [1995]
genre: pop-rock, Spanish folk

Hey, white moms! Did you know the band that made "Shout", "Head Over Heels", and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" released an album in 1995? I've researched this kind of phenomenon for years now and can confirm that a lot of the bands you remember from the 80s released more music after you stopped giving a shit! It's true!!! Hey, millennials! Remember Donnie Darko? That queef snorkeling vocal mess disguised as a song at the end of that movie has a good version that came out before most of you were born! That band used to be a big deal until the two main members split in the early-to-mid 90s, leaving the remaining member to finish up an album at his new home studio and pretty much write this 1995 album by himself! Hey, gen Z! Look, this is one of those bands you immediately forget when you heard them at the dentist and I mean no disrespect but you're not going to have the attention span to research this. Furthermore, I can assure you from firsthand experience that the scholarly approach to Tears for Fears is not worth your fleeting time.

Raoul and the Kings of Spain is basically a Roland Orzabal solo project but it's called a Tears for Fears album because why the fuck not? The first time I heard this, I found it kind of weird that it had a lot of Spanish stuff that seemed to harken back to a culture that the creator didn't know about only to find out that Orzabal isn't a racist cunt, I just need to spend much, much less time on Twitter. Roland Orzabal is known as an Englishman because he's the dude that isn't Curt Smith from the band that did "Everybody Wants to Rule the World". However, he has very strong ties to his Spanish heritage and lyrically explores that a bit in personal ways that are kind of interesting to look into. You're not going to have your mind blown by any of the lyrical content but what he did with a longstanding brand is commendable. But is the music fucking good? This one really has its heavy ups and downs. For whatever reason, I keep fucking listening to it. It is nowhere near as good as The Hurting or Songs From the Big Chair but I really appreciate its own flavor of Tears for Fears. There are cheesy moments even for Tears for Fears standards. For the most part, these moments are made up for with pretty moments and fairly unique guitar and vocal arrangements and effects. I recommend listening to the album once through but can't guarantee you're going to love every track. I have admittedly listened to it several times now and still don't listen to a handful of songs on the album on their own or skip them sometimes during a revisit. The only one I will mention by name here is "Don't Drink the Water". It's one of my least favorite songs from this album anyway because it is corny and the parts that do punch are in a more dad-rock way than in any way actually intriguing or awe-inspiring. In addition, it has the f-slur disguised cleverly with everyone's favorite cigarette slang excuse! Yeah, who knew someone would need a content warning for a fucking Tears for Fears release! All of the genuine and not-hammed-up weirdness of the album is thematic and seems to escalate as the album continues while still being pop-rock. Though at least half of these songs are a good time on their own, "Raoul" really shines as a full experience more than fuel for your shuffler playlist. I wouldn't be talking about the album here if I didn't really enjoy it but it's more of a "why do I enjoy this and will other people like it at all?" than a "this album is the tits, why is nobody talking about it?" If you have never delved into a full Tears for Fears album, please don't start with this one. On that note, I will have you know that I have knocked off a few years of my life expectancy to listen to all of Tears for Fears' studio albums and can say with conviction that "Raoul" is not their worst. The Seeds of Love is! Though I recommend Songs from the Big Chair more, it's one of those albums that more people are aware of than they think. Raoul and the Kings of Spain is more interesting to talk about because nobody has in about 24 years.

Social Dancing by Bis [1999]
genre: indie pop, electropop

Remember watching Powerpuff Girls when you were eight and thinking "damn, this outro theme is so cool. If there were more music like this I would totally figure out what weed is and smoke it to that while I don't do my homework"? Bis is the band that did that. Turns out they weren't just hired hands in terms of composition for the show and actually had a flag in the ground of 90s electronic music. To my knowledge the big one was and unfortunately still is Social Dancing. It has punk elements here and there but mostly, the electropop label fits here. Though mostly following a bit of a verse, chorus pattern of a pop album, the chord choices and layering between the guitars and synths keep the album consistently interesting. The vocals are also really fun and harmonically creative. All three members do vocals at various points of the album. It's not in a System of a Down way where it sounds like the vocalists are fighting each other for your attention and another Chop Suey royalty check. The singers all do different harmony parts or overdub themselves sometimes depending on what they actually wanted to do with each individual part of each song. It's really cool to hear and is electronic music that is really unique if nothing else. The album after this one was a lot more shrill and yelly. Not terrible but shrill and yelly. Despite growing up with Powerpuff, Bis is pretty new to me so I don't know if this is their best album or whatever. I know it's definitely not their worst and one I would highly recommend. If you have any friends that have been asking for Scottish electronic music from the 90s with punk undertones recommendations, Social Dancing might just be the missing puzzle piece to their fucking Bisless heart.

鬼葬 (KISOU) by Dir En Grey [2002]
genre: industrial rock, alternative metal

Dir En Grey is a "Shoving Music Down Your Throat" mainstay but most of it has been their more "processed" stuff for lack of a better term. Dir En Grey is one of the very rare metal bands that don't completely stagnate when faced with higher production value. If you're just now hearing of them, Arche is still my favorite album from them and I especially recommend it to people who like weirdo metal. Probably Uroboros for a little more variety. All that babble out of the way, KISOU is one of their first albums, back when they were still considered a visual kei band if I'm not mistaken. They still did not sound like what I have mostly heard from visual kei but that's part of what I like about them in a sense. KISOU is decidedly less heavy than most of their albums. However, it's not particularly soft either and still has all the weirdness one would expect from Dir En Grey. There are a lot of really emotive performances from the vocalist, Kyo. Across their discography, these usually range from situationally moving to really fucking silly to probably unsettling for most people, and I mean all this is a positive sense. "Moving" is more subjective for KISOU if that makes sense. Some of the silly stuff I still personally recognize as Kyo trying to go for something specific and probably succeeding. I also don't speak any more Japanese than a native two-year-old so maybe to a fluent Japanese speaker, this is the stupidest shit. Works for me. It's harder for me to recommend a lot of their albums I've heard several times a piece now because they are much more "metal" than "alternative". KISOU is somehow less heavy but notably wrackier. Still, it's a varied album in terms of alternative metal and industrial rock. As one of their longer albums, if my memory is accurate here, it never grinds its gears. It's still weirdo metal and although not a punk album, I think it will do better for people within that crowd than it would for your friendly neighborhood metalhead. It's a very unique album in a way that is hard to put into words unless you have heard Dir En Grey's other stuff, which works out because despite KISOU being really good, I still recommend Arche and Uroboros more. That's a lot of homework though so for those who don't want to sacrifice that much time just because I told you to, here's a reminder that at the top of this post, there's a playlist consisting of one song from each album featured in this post so you can hear a pretty dope-ass song from KISOU called "Gyakujou Tannou Keloid Milk". Did I mention this is weirdo metal?

Tremulant by The Mars Volta [2002]
genre: prog rock, post-hardcore

I somehow had no idea that there was a studio project by The Mars Volta that I somehow didn't know existed until 2021. The Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands of all time and has been for about a decade now. So this is a big deal to me as much as it is mystifying that I could be that negligent. This isn't some strange, obscure B-side kind of thing. This EP is the first thing that The Mars Volta put out. They weren't out of nowhere either. The Mars Volta features a few prominent members of At the Drive-In, a fairly influential and decently well-known punk/hardcore band. Tremulant embodies a weird tonal crossover between the adrenaline from At the Drive-In and the trippy prog energy-lightswitch that is The Mars Volta and their first album in particular. For those who don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, Tremulant is three prog-rock songs done by punk artists. It's punk done by a band with an idea of what a time signature is or at the very least occasionally using 3/4 time on purpose. Also, nice organ sounds and occasionally psychedelic parts. Wouldn't be a Mars Volta release without at least like seven of those. Tremulant might not be the first thing I recommend for people to listen to from The Mars Volta. At the same time, I feel like the band is generally pretty fucking acquired taste anyway. If someone said "show me that annoying band you listen to but note I probably won't press play unless it's less than 30 minutes long", I would certainly show them Tremulant in hopes that they enjoy it as much as I do or it at least inspires them to listen to The Mars Volta's other stuff. Look, I swear it's good alright?!? For those who are familiar with the band, here's a bonus section! For those who really want me to shut the fuck up about The Mars Volta already, skip the bonus section or something!

BONUS: Landscape Tantrums by The Mars Volta [2021]
genre: prog rock

One of the most popular albums, if not the most highly regarded, from The Mars Volta is De-Loused in the Comatorium. Personally, it's in my top 3 favorites from them even though I wore it out the first time I heard it roughly 8 years ago. Landscape Tantrums is a bunch of demos of that album in early conception. The difference between Landscape Tantrums and when most bands do something like this is that Landscape Tantrums covers pretty much the entire original track-listing. Lyrics are different and sometimes missing, vocal melodies are altered, harmonized, de-harmonized, or scrapped entirely. A lot of lead guitar overdub wasn't done yet. You might be thinking "I can't stomach that, it's going to sound like shit. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how clean this release sounded considering the fact that it was essentially a demo reel recorded sometime between 1999 and 2000. I'm sure it was fine-tuned for a 2021 release as to not make it ear-shattering. It still isn't something I would listen to every day but something I could recommend to someone without being a sadist. I won't blab about this one too much nor am I putting it on the playlist. The interesting aspects of this album lie in the fact that it is an unfinished version of something that already exists. As such, I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't already a fan of The Mars Volta or at least "De-Loused". If you really like that album as I do, this is worth at least one listen.

good kid, m.A.A.d. city by Kendrick Lamar [2012]
genre: hip-hop

To Pimp a Butterfly, another A+ album by Kendrick Lamar, was one of those rare albums I find that really woke me up from the process of just trying out new music. This one even more so than many others that further inspire me in both musicianship and in life. Listening to To Pimp a Butterfly was supposed to just be trying out a new album while doing something else. It demanded my attention. Not in an annoying way. It was magnetizing to my mind in so many ways. good kid, m.A.A.d. city is not that album. It's still pretty fucking good though. I would say it is equally creative. "m.A.A.d. city" plays out like a feature-length film set in Compton. This is one of those albums that uses long dialogue segments without seeming pretentious or obnoxious. From front to back, the album delivers what it seems to be selling. This effectively tells a competent story without being too on the nose with what's happening. Something I don't have a problem with but many might with "TPaB" is that there are a lot of parts that fully juxtapose from most of what each song has going for it. Not quite "inserts" but segues that pull out in front of you at 70mph. Other than the dialogue portions, this album has more of a tendency to stay on each song's original course. Make no mistake though; if you like the sporadic genre bends of "TPaB", there is plenty of that in good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Moments towards the beginning upon my first two listens of the album made me say "oh cool, a hip-hop album" in comparison to "TPaB". By "beginning" I am referring to the first three or four songs. They are still good songs but anyone who isn't a fan of hip-hop probably is not going to be particularly swayed by this one until a good handful of songs in. This is one of the main things that would make me still recommend To Pimp a Butterfly over good kid, m.A.A.d. city. So if you were laughably behind on the times as I was prior to listening to "Butterfly", I guess listen to that first, especially if you aren't familiar with Kendrick Lamar. In any other case, I still recommend giving good kid, m.A.A.d. city a shot. I'm going to go ahead and shut up about this one for now. Typing the full title of this one out is physically and mentally exhausting.

Restoration by Haken [2014]
genre: prog metal

I fucking love Haken. I started listening to them in 2020 and according to Spotify I am in the top 1% of people listening to Haken in 2021. Let me tell you about the EP called Restoration before I find a way to avoid all of my taxes. Haken is a prog metal band but not a screamy one. I guess I get why most people assume death metal that sounds like a skipping vinyl when I say "prog metal" but I would say a safe 98% of Haken's discography doesn't sound like that at all. So apparently there are some old Haken demos I haven't heard from when the band was still a band baby. Haken was fully formed after the members decided they were badass enough to be a full-time prog-rock band and goddamn the extra years of effort show. Restoration came out about four albums into Haken's discography. Most of the music is recycled from their old demos, completely reworked all the way down to the songs' titles. It's only three songs but the average Haken song is probably seven or eight minutes long. The first song is pretty cool. I particularly like "Earthlings" and "Crystallized" though, the latter of which is over 10 minutes long. These three are notably melodic not unlike their other stuff released before 2014. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Restoration doesn't sound like an expansion pack to whatever album preceded this one. Although it's closer to The Mountain than Vector and Virus, it doesn't sound like something that didn't quite make it onto The Mountain for whatever reason. It also doesn't sound exactly like their first two albums, though you could argue that for the first track. Restoration, if someone new to this sort of music can stomach the runtime of each song, also isn't terribly heavy or aggressive half the time. It definitely has its heavy moments; Haken is still a prog metal band and they didn't take a break from that for this EP. Before Vector, Haken was pretty good at saving the aggressive stuff for moments that are supposed to give off an aggravating or anxious mood. A lot of "Crystallized" is actually pretty fucking upbeat, a lot of it sounding kind of more like Yes than one might expect, as much as I hate making such comparisons. I'm not just using this EP as an excuse to gush about Haken. I kind of am but I'm not just doing that. Until I become re-obsessed with another song by Haken that changes my mind or perhaps a new release, "Earthlings" from this EP is one of my absolute new favorite songs by them. That's really saying something because I have spammed the fuck out of Aquarius, Visions, Affinity, and The Mountain. Restoration really isn't the worst way to try Haken out either. One of my favorite things about Haken is how good they are at chaining a story together throughout the course of their album. Restoration doesn't really do this unless I'm missing something. Aside from that, it does a pretty good job of getting across most of the things I like about the band in under 30 minutes. If you're new to Haken and you like good music, I would probably recommend Affinity. If you're new to Haken and you like metal, I would recommend Visions. If you're new to Haken and you like fucking goddamn heavy metal but don't mind a melody line every now and again, Vector is for you. Okay, I need to stop myself. I really like Haken. Stop. Fuck! Shut up!

Hitch by The Joy Formidable [2016]
genre: alt-rock

The Joy Formidable is a really cool and easily identifiable Welsh alt-rock band that I never hear anyone talk about here in the States. Every time I look into them they seem to be doing fine though. They're still hangin' in there! All of their releases are pretty fucking good and it's going to be up to your personal alt-rock tastes which one might be for you. Duh, right? So why Hitch? The album that I think they are most known for is The Big Roar for a few select singles. This isn't to say they fell completely into obscurity so much as they fell into complete obscurity in America. The album after this one, Wolf's Law, is really fucking cool but both of these albums feel like an indie rock three-piece making an indie rock album with slightly higher than usual production value. They're still unique but there's less dynamic tonal variety especially in the overall audio department on their first album. Wolf's Law really picks up as it keeps going but starts out similarly. Hitch is where things get a bit weirder while still being charming-ass Joy Formidable. I don't know if "weird" is the right term so much as "melancholy" though. I also listened to AAARTH this year and that's weirder and dips into the alternative metal pool from time to time. To elaborate on what I meant by "feels like an indie-rock three-piece", there are many vocal trade-off moments between the guitarist and the bassist that sometimes just sound like they're drunkenly yelling out a melody line and Melodyne pairs with reverb to turn that into music. This is a staple to the point of stereotype in alt-rock. It's much, much less annoying when The Joy Formidable does it. Moments like this I guess have this arguably more "live" sound to it that a lot of people appreciate. I'm not one of those people. When it comes to what I enjoy in an album and how I create my own music, live is live, studio is studio; very few exceptions. Hitch sounds like they actually went in wanting to make an album instead of just seeing what stuck. This probably sounds fucking cold and whiney. I really don't mean it to be, this is just the best way I know to describe Hitch in comparison to The Big Roar and some of Wolf's Law. Delightful stuff all around. There really isn't, to this point, a bad Joy Formidable album. That said, I picked Hitch over AAARTH for this blog simply because I think Hitch is more accessible to more people overall. This is why I earnestly really like AAARTH but a general audience will probably find more that they immediately appreciate about Hitch over AAARTH, or as general as this audience gets while still managing to find this thing where I just ramble about music that I like.

Since I started writing this, The Joy Formidable also came out with a new album called Into the Blue and it's fucking good. It has one of the lowest points of the band in my personal opinion but it's brief. The rest of the album is every bit as good as their others.

Swords by Nick Lutsko [2019]
genre: indie rock, I guess

Nick Lutsko makes really silly songs on the internet, known mostly for ones that dunk on idiots that conservatives think are really cool. He also makes songs that are not joke songs. He has some pretty cool music videos for them on his YouTube channel which is mostly populated with lower-budget music videos for the goofy songs about Dan Bongino and Gremlins. Explaining this makes me sound like an IGN article that doesn't know what a meme is so I'm just going to explain Swords instead. Swords is a full-length album that is not a comedy album. It's not to say that there aren't things about the album that aren't goofy but it's usually to a higher lyrical point than it is to be super funny. Swords also has tracks that all start with the letter "S". Not sure what the fuck is up with this despite listening to the album a few times. Indie rock is the best descriptor I have for the album's sound because it's all over the place. This is why I love it. Most of the time when I listen to music, it's a bunch of stuff I like shuffled together. No particular genre, just a lot of stuff I like regardless of how it sounds. Swords works for me really well in that sense. There are elements of everything from pop to rockabilly to symphonic rock and other styles I'm too uncultured to have the balls to guess a name for. The songs seem to have a lot to do with privileged white Americans standing at the wayside while other people are oppressed both in and out of their country. It also seems to be lyrically spoken from the vantage point of Nick himself, a Tennessee-raised musician seeing this sort of thing repeatedly occur throughout his own life as well as his own musings and mental health in direct response. The songs are all memorable and catchy in the midst of the heavy themes. As the album continues, it gets overall darker with sadder-sounding tones and bolder symphonic layers. The last track, "Software" is really somber and pretty with a fitting sense of finality to the album's tale but also has this slight feeling of continuation, which is pretty fitting since this was released right before 2020 came and fucking happened. The only real "problem" I have with the album is that some of the mix is kind of quiet for something released in 2019. Magic Machine by An Endless Sporadic is one of my favorite albums and it was kind of quiet and occasionally thin for 2016. It's not that big of a deal to turn the volume up for a little bit. Though it varies itself and is not an album I would all-around consider "repetitive", this is a pretty standard arranged album in terms of accessibility. Translated from computer to human: it's not a prog-rock album despite what I usually talk up this much and it goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus frequently. I have no problem with this. For most people, this isn't a problem in general. I also highly recommend his YouTube stuff, a lot of which is also on Spotify in the form of Songs on the Computer.

MASS by The GazettE [2021]
genre: visual kei

The Gazette is one of my favorite bands of all time and I haven't been sitting there waiting for their new release since their 2011 album, Toxic. This is because, in my opinion, The Gazette's last great album came out in 2009. Despite being my favorite band, I only really have a soft spot for their first four albums. Every full-length album before Toxic is really fucking good. Toxic is when they started leaning way heavier into industrial metal than they did on the 2009 album Dim. The sound of Dim with more pitch correction and industrial influence basically turns it into a nu-metal album with a better singer. That was Toxic and subsequently the four albums after Toxic. It's not great. It's not the worst but it's not great. The next four albums more or less do the same exact shit and I'm constantly disappointed by this. Their first four albums are four of my favorite albums ever and Toxic was at least a step in a slightly different direction for the band at the time. MASS doesn't do too much to break out of this moldy, crusty mold but at risk of sounding like a complete cunt, it sounds more "refined". Don't worry, I too taste a little puke. The way I've explained it to my friends who have never heard of The Gazette beyond my insane ramblings and the existence of Black Butler season 2, I explain MASS as "it sounds like songs from the Shadow the Hedgehog soundtrack but on purpose and better." That's not a dig on Shadow the Hedgehog's soundtrack as much as it's a knock on nu-metal. MASS does not feel like a nu-metal album. It doesn't sound as cool as Dim but there are some little gimmicks that help separate it from the five albums in between. Most of the metal stuff I recommend here or talk to people about is weirdo shit. The Gazette is pretty fucking accessible unless you hate any form of death growl at all in a song or are racist. As a whole, MASS might be the most generally accessible one I can think of while still being a fun album from beginning to end. The guitars usually serve as a wall that serves the melody of whatever pretty synth or vocal tracks are playing at the time. The drum mix on this one is pretty solid too. Nothing groundbreaking or anything but the drums don't sound plastic or like YouTube metal. The only song that I think is kind of comparatively lame is "Frenzy". The opening riff kind of sounds like The Gazette covering Metallica which would be one of the only ways I would agree to voluntarily listen to Metallica. Even then, "Frenzy" isn't a bad song. It makes up for its basic-bitch metal riff pretty quickly. Ruki's voice sounds great. Granted it's probably pretty well Melodyned, it doesn't necessarily sound like it had to be. I'm not a mixing expert but I'm also not a complete amateur. I usually have a pretty good ear for that sort of thing. His screams sound a lot different over the course of the last few albums and not in a way of "I'm getting old but this is my career now so I'm just going to ravage my fucking throat". The scream parts are pretty damn rare on MASS. That's part of the reason why I said this is one of the most accessible albums in their discography. The screams that are there are good, gritty screams but they are mixed in a way that sounds pseudo-plosive without being wracky. They're "soft" but they're still screams. I went back to flip through a few of the songs to pick one for this year's playlist and was thinking "is this really good enough to put on here or will I be embarrassed now that the novelty of 'this is the new Gazette album' has passed?" I was surprised by twists and turns I forgot the album took, though briefly. The album isn't the most artistically baffling, wheel-retconning thing in the world but it is creative enough within its own merit for me to say it's a solid album. Not every song needs to change time signature, genre, and tempo three times for it to be intriguing. I'm pretty happy that I have an album by one of my favorite bands that can serve as a stepping stone for people to maybe try some of the stuff I like even more than the new stuff. MASS isn't the best album ever, not the best album by The Gazette, nor is it the best album on this list. It is still a good album and one I confidently recommend.

These aren't on the Shoving Music Down Your Throat playlist but my buddy Game & Sound released a new sick-ass Metroid medley called Journey of a Hunter. This is a big deal for him but even if he had just miraculously slapped this one out, I would still recommend it because his medleys are nutty and this one is no exception.

https://open.spotify.com/track/7Gk6h7DbNHzzf6THnOAAuj?si=eda1ec80198a4673

"Writers Write" but They Also Sleep

 It's true!

It's not something I talk about often unless I'm dunking on the American college system or myself but I have a Bachelor's in creative writing with a screenplay focus. That's about the extent I usually talk about this. I feel like writing something that doesn't have hours upon hours of lore or revisions attached to it, so let's dive in.

My college story is long. To paraphrase: my parents paid for most of my college tuition, starting with a semester of music education immediately after high school. Followed by that was a semester as a journalism major but might as well have been undecided because I just knocked out general education courses that semester. I dropped out and got a certification in audio engineering, looked for work, and tried to figure out what I wanted to fucking do for a few years, then decided to go to a community college for software engineering. I had an actual fucking breakdown and dropped out then decided to go for creative writing after moving out of my parents' place (finally -- there's nothing wrong with living with your parents, I just had a consistently toxic relationship with mine).

I found that I really liked writing. The process of it was relatively soothing to me and I liked that I could do it fucking anywhere. I wanted a degree in something and finally found something I could tolerate at the worst. The schooling was mostly not great with some cool moments. I met a lot of cool instructors and read the work of some students with some really cool ideas. I liked some of the challenges. However, I thought most of them were overkill. I finished all of my requirements and got my degree anyway.

As with the vast majority of my school experience, I tried to avoid anything extracurricular. In a college of other writing students, I didn't think I would really connect with any of them on anything other than a superficial "let's network" capacity. The ones I did find particularly intriguing didn't seem to have any interest in me. There were avenues for us to get to know each other despite all of my classes being online. I just didn't want to "force myself onto others". This is my problem with almost every goddamn thing I do. Wait, that's not the topic of this blog post. How did this paragraph even start? Ah! Got it. One day, I did do something extracurricular.

The school as a whole and certain programs would hold their own live chat things where we all watch some sort of talk or seminar. Many of the ones I wanted to try out, I would end up getting distracted by something else, decide I was too depressed to pay attention, they were scheduled on days I had to go to my terrible job, or some other such reason. One I finally made it to. I don't remember what the initial point of this thing was supposed to be but it consisted of a person or two that worked for the creative writing program and a published author.

Maybe I misinterpreted something but the guest author really had an air of just "well, just do things, duh." The topics thrown at him were usually "how specifically might new writers do this?" or "how do you pump out certain works that fast?" or "how often do you revise your stuff?" Most of his responses were basically "writers write; you just have to start getting into the habit of writing for at least 4 hours a day. If you can't do that, what's stopping you? Like, what are you even doing?" He proceeded to say "I write like that all the time, sometimes more, and I still have time to watch four hours of TV every night. So if you're not doing that then what are you even doing? What's stopping you?"

I did not respond in the text chat, though I could have. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Now writing *something* every single day is not necessarily bad advice. The message I felt was implied though was very competitive, which is sadder than anything else coming from a published author who has actually made some income from his intellectual property punching down to a bunch of 20-somethings gambling with their careers or single moms trying to take life by the balls. I think he even unironically talked about how the whole thing was a competition. The one or two people in the video chat we were all watching did not necessarily refute this nor completely disagree with the guest speaker. I won't get into one of the only other ones of these things I ever attended where there were about six writers and every time the woman would try to make an interesting point, the men would field questions she was already addressing. "Why even bring up this experience in your life?" is probably a better avenue for us to stroll down here.

I don't make the fucking money to write 4 hours a day. I spend many days out of the house at someplace I don't want to be so I can make money ***to*** write. Mostly writing things that, released fully or not, will make me approximately $0. Now all of this was pre-COVID-19. Even if it weren't, it's still not a neurodivergent-friendly mentality to be spewing to people that are trying to learn what the hell to do with their passions. This is especially haphazard to students, many of which had kids to look after as well.

This "constantly push things out" mentality doesn't really help anyone. Because if you think the dude from the web seminar telling college students something along the lines of "it's all a competition and you're all competing with me so what's your excuse for not constantly writing" might be a bit of a silly willy, he became that silly willy with that mentality. Probably. That or some writer's drama villain origin plot point but in real life. There are things that could be gleaned from this that could be helpful while still keeping yourself healthy. Writing a little something every day is great practice. The saying "writers write" is as true as it is redundant. However, some people, like the published author and pro student competitor I've been dishing about this whole time, kind of make "writers write" imply that you aren't a writer if you aren't writing. This might sound ridiculous on its own or at least benign. For people already self-conscious about going into a field that can be notoriously unforgiving to your sense of rejection and impostor syndrome, that benign notion can lead to thoughts like "you are not a writer whatsoever unless you suffer and constantly diminish your own health". This is what irritates me and I think part of that is because it still affects me. It's one of those things where no matter how much I am aware of it, it doesn't make it go away. I can't imagine what this could mean for people who are worse about these sort of mental habits than I am or have dreamed about writing and only writing for a long time.

Of course, there's also the fact that not everybody can find a job in writing anything. Writing things you actually like and getting paid for it is a rarity. Writing your own heartfelt story and profiting from its publication is like seeing a shooting star during a tornado next to a volcano from the bottom of a well.

I guess what I'm saying is that getting into a routine is good and all but it isn't going to be good for you your entire life. There's a rule of thumb with singing practicing and warming up. If you feel any sort of pain (that you aren't obviously forcing out yourself), just stop. Pick it up later or the next day. I feel the same with writing. Sometimes "later" is a week later. The thing is if you really love doing what you're doing or writing what you're writing, why would you just magically not want to do that anymore? Taking time to figure out what's up with that is important too. Otherwise, you're writing what you're writing to convince an imaginary college speaker that you're valid. It isn't servicing the story or your passion. Sometimes, when this happens to me, I just switch to writing something else. Sometimes, my brain just doesn't work so I play Hades for like six hours instead of working on things I "should" be working on.

I guess that's it for this blog post. Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh! (Thanks for reading, don't spread a fucking disease)

So I played NEO: TWEWY and Can't Finish It

 The World Ends with You is a DS game from the late aughts that converted me from an edgy, angsty teenager into a teenager hoping for some greater empathetic purpose in life. If you're an adult, I'm not going to tell you the plot will have the same effect on you. In fact, the whole story is kind of all over the place. But bad? Nah. It had a really unconventional control scheme that set it apart from a lot of the shovelware and other half-assed trash that the DS library now carries around as its legacy. The characters are memorable, the theming is consistent, the art style is beautiful, and the soundtrack glues all of those things together tremendously. So a sequel came out a few weeks ago and I was really excited to play it. It's called "NEO: The World Ends with You", not to ever in a million years be confused with "The World Ends with You". Unfortunately, I wanted it on disc and have an original PS4 so I can fuck myself.

My PS4 has been having disc issues for a while. For those fortunate to be unaware of this, Sony thought it would be a fucking great, future-proof idea to make the power and eject buttons on the PS4 touch-sensitive. There's also a weird rubber piece where the eject button is that's supposed to like... protect it from dust or something? The problem is that whoever thought that was a good idea has to be dead now because there's no way they can be this stupid and survive day-to-day life for this long. Rubber expands when exposed to a certain amount of heat. Like, for instance, a compact computer with a big-ass fan attached to it because running itself makes it so fucking hot. As such, a lot of people, myself included had the issue where the expanding rubber starts fucking with the eject button, usually hitting said button repeatedly. I had this issue and decided "alright, fine, I'll take it out" which is something a lot of people have been doing to fix the issue. For me, it worked for a few months to a year. This is it for a lot of people, more or less. For some people who I guess professionally run under ladders, this doesn't fix the issue and the button is still just fucked anyway for no conceivable reason. I'm one of those. If I keep the PS4 unplugged and stash it away somewhere else for a long time and then plug it back in, it works pretty consistently. For a bit.

I streamed NEO: TWEWY for roughly 7 hours the day after it came out (I pre-ordered it like a sucker and got shafted, having to wait a day for a fucking pre-order and the pre-order bonuses didn't even work, so if you haven't noticed yet, this whole experience has been a shitshow overall). Seemed fine. Streamed it again for about 2 hours a day or two later. No issues. Played it in bed for a few days and then bam! It spat out the disk at the end of a 5-fight enemy wave. Right at the end! So I'm trying to look up ways to just get the disk license and iso onto my PS4 for it to just be playable. If you look into it, all the disc basically fucking ends up being is a license anyway. If they're just going to treat it as a collector's item and security pass anyway, then why the fuck can I not just easily save said license and play the game without the disc now that I have objectively proven that I purchased the game for myself. That's a rant for another day and for someone who knows way more about this kinda thing than I do. I could not fucking figure it out. Ripping PS3 discs for emulation is pretty fucking easy, it's the emulation itself that's tricky. Ripping PS4 discs so you can take the disc's contents and use them on the intended hardware requires knowing how to use fucking Ubuntu! Yep! So I hope to figure that out one day but I tried for like 2-3 hours yesterday to no fucking avail.

Anyway, for the whopping total of fewer than 20 hours I did put into the game, would I recommend it to other people? Yeah. Not "YYYEAHHH!!!!" but "yeah".

Let's be clear: I didn't see the announcement for the sequel and think "oh, this game is going to be great and I'm going to love it just as much as I did the first game". I was cautiously optimistic because a lot of the original development team, including the composer, were returning. Still, Square Enix has been up to some weird bullshit for a long time now and no matter how cool h.a.n.d. might be, Square Enix still has their grubby claws on this thing. I was curious how they were going to implement controlling multiple characters at once and how a fully 3D environment would affect the overworld and combat. So I was a lot more excited to see, for better or worse, what they were going to do with the game more than I was excited about the actual game. Now having played it, I can't say a lot is improved but there isn't a whole lot about it that is much worse if that makes sense. 

I think chaining noise together is a lot more irritating in this one and I think, if we're not going to consider the plot here for a sec, this is the thing they fucked up the most in comparison to the original game. This is especially annoying because it isn't the biggest deal until you start figuring out how to get bigger rewards and feel comfortable gambling with big waves of enemies for item drops in the first game. It feels like a lot more of a gradual process and was a lot more daunting. I think I spent the vast majority of my time playing NEO at a lower level. For those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, this is how TWEWY's leveling system works. Like any other action RPG, enemies come at you in waves or with just one big motherfucker of a boss, or in the case of TWEWY, often two big motherfuckers of bosses and depending on the semantics of the planar rules of the original DS game, you could say four big motherfuckers. Each has their own exp. yield but you can multiply how much that is based on two factors. One is your difficulty, which you can change at pretty much any point in the game. So Easy mode gives you less exp. but the fights are a lot easier to manage. Normal is pretty standard though in the case of the original TWEWY, still decently challenging without being overwhelming. The difficulty curve in that game I remember being pretty solid but keep in mind, it has been about three years since I last played it. Hard and Very Hard give you more exp., so much so that Very Hard is a post-game unlock. Each enemy also has a drop rate for each difficulty and that's not just by percentage. The item the enemy normally drops might not drop at all on Very Hard but a much rarer pin might drop instead. This gives the original game a lot of longevity and reasons to come back to goomba-esque encounters post-game without feeling like a complete chore. TWEWY didn't work with random encounters though. You had to scan for encounter symbols floating around the city and drag them to Neku on the touch screen. This makes the encounters harder on top of the fact that you have to beat all of them one after the other. However, this gives you huge multipliers and sometimes this is the only way to guarantee rare pin-drops or even come close.

NEO - "The Matrix", okay cool I acknowledged it, I'm referring to the sequel as "NEO" for the rest of this rant and if you can't pull your head out 1999's ass, that's on you from this point forward. Though I can't blame you, it's a good movie. NEO doesn't do this too much differently except the other difficulties are locked off by this weird social network thing that I'll probably get to in a minute. That's really not terrible just something I found odd in comparison. The amount of encounters you can have is maxed out at 5. I'm sure there's a thing you can get later that either raises the cap or uncaps it. I'm not really sure what the point of this was. I guess it was not to make players overpowered as fuck during their first run of the story missions but also like, if I can stomach it, maybe just let me do it? On top of that, and maybe this is just me, I feel like the combat of NEO is significantly easier than TWEWY. So in both games, your max level is raised by exp. points (no duh, right?). In this game, you can lower your level to fight waves. This makes the fights riskier but also boost that drop and experience multiplier even more. In TWEWY, this ranged from a worthy challenge and a gauge to see how personally good you're getting at the combat to a one-hit-and-you're-dead nightmare. Even on max level, some of the late-game and post-game fights are challenging and if you want those pin drops, you have to play them on higher difficulties with your level reduced. In NEO, I felt like this pretty much just comes down to what you personally think you can handle. NEO is a lot more of a hack-and-slash. Each character in your party is respectively attached to whatever pin you have and that pin is forever set to a button. This makes the controls kind of awkward over time but your damage output becomes so high so early that it barely matters. Once I tried lowering my level, I basically only went back to max if I wanted to absolutely secure victory in a fight without dropping down to Easy. I think I did this twice at most. I was playing at half of my max level or less and just slaughtering everything. At first, you might think it's because I had so much experience with the last game but I haven't played that in years and the combat of these two games are almost nothing alike. So I think they really dumbed this down for newcomers, which I guess is fine. I think they went a little too dumb.

The social network is another example of Square Enix's boner for making weird menus that are just a skill tree that's harder to navigate than a run-of-the-mill skill tree. No, I'm not trying to make another movie reference. In the case of NEO, I think it's fine. Difficult to navigate for sure but not so difficult to read and figure out. It's pretty straightforward and doesn't affect the core gameplay enough to be a downside anyway. I think it adds to some of the theming of the game thus far and it's a clever way of combining the convoluted web of character connections that a lot of games have an obnoxious-looking menu for with the tried-and-true skill tree used by thousands of RPGs for decades.

I shouldn't really judge the story but I will say that the cast of characters in TWEWY is portrayed better than in NEO. I'm not talking about the voice-acting, just the way they're carried in the plot. I was intrigued by Neku and Shiki almost immediately. There was enough mystique behind Shiki and the main struggle to also make every other character a welcome and enigmatic inclusion. NEO feels like the straight-to-DVD Disney sequel of this concept only not as bad. Rindo and Fret are fine characters, I just think TWEWY did a more efficient and poignant job at making me care. I like watching Rindo and Fret interact with this scary world that they've been thrust into but I feel pretty disjointed from the whole affair for some reason. Part of this is because Neku and other characters would get into arguments that proposed various moral dilemmas. This might not sound that interesting on paper but given the confines of the reaper's game, it adds variables to morality that would be obvious in real life. In NEO, a lot of the character conflict just kind of feels like processed drama. It isn't completely ineffective or shallow, it just doesn't hit half as hard as the original. I could say more on this but again, haven't beat the game because my PS4 is a piece of garbage.

The whole equipping one pin to each character is something I'm not a huge fan of lore-wise but perhaps this is explained later or in post-game. Without going on a tangent, Neku uses psyches through pins while other characters channel it through other means. This is why the bosses all have unique abilities and why Shiki has a semi-sentient stuffed cat that kills enemies. Everybody using the pins wouldn't bother me if returning characters weren't also using the pins even though, for the most part, they literally wouldn't have been able to. It would have just been some Hot Topic bogo deal, impulse buy for other characters. As I already said, this is probably explained later so I'll shut up about it now. In any case, I like that the controls were awkward in TWEWY because it actually utilized the DS's gimmick to play into the sync level which also played a big part in the plot. In NEO, they're just awkward based on which pins you want to use at the time. Being able to map your own buttons within limitations would have been nice. Maybe this is a feature later but I see no reason why they should have done that if that's the case.

Reading that last paragraph over again in draft form now and I wanted to address the fact that again, this is complaining about plot points in NEO that might be wrapped up later. There's also the fact that TWEWY's plot was very existential and not fully rooted in reality to begin with and I mean that in a positive and factual way. At the same time, I played almost 20 hours of NEO before my PS4 rejected and ejected it. I feel like that's a lot of time to sink into a sequel's plot and not have this point explained but again, it's TWEWY.

Before the game came out, I read an interview that NEO was going to be like Persona 5 length. I truly cannot see that working for this game but maybe it will. I feel like Persona 5's combat was a lot more open-ended. Whether fights took one second or 15 minutes was largely dependent on a lot of choices made outside of that battle rather than just not having the right equipment or difficulty alterations. In NEO, unless something fundamentally changes the foundation of how the game plays and how the plot is being served up, there's no way this doesn't get stale after a while. I still want to figure this out for myself. Until then, I have been worried about this since before the game came out and now having played a decent chunk of the game, I am just as worried, I just now have good reasoning behind it.

The food system is snappier than in the original. The menus are weirder to navigate but they aren't necessarily worse than in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, you're at the mercy of loading everything up on DS hardware. Everything's a lot faster in NEO, y'know, except for the plot. There are a lot of things that NEO lets you have at from the beginning that were locked off in TWEWY. These include the concept of pig noise and being able to see where side-quests might be. In TWEWY, I get why these were not immediately made apparent to the player. In NEO, I guess the developers had no real reason to keep these from veteran players or new players so the game just blatantly lets you know that you can do them and I think that's cool.

The clothing equipment system works about the same. The only thing I'm worried about late game is that they added a lot of different brands to this game. Making different outfits actually affects a lot in the game and this changed a handful of things in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, wearing all of one brand made you more powerful. In NEO, there are so many brands that I feel like being able to do this would be more difficult. At the point of the game where you might be able to do this, you'll have so much exp and other equipment that this brand boost would be fairly pointless to even use anyway. Didn't get that far though so this is just speculation. Thanks, Sony.

The soundtrack isn't as consistently good but it's still fitting to the setting and all that. The new inclusions have their bangers and stinkers. The stinkers still fit the atmosphere. The new versions of songs from TWEWY are fucking cool too.

All things considered, NEO is a competent action RPG with a competent plot so far. It has enough unique stuff going for it to set it apart from what people would expect from a modern, anime-looking-ass action RPG. In comparison to TWEWY, I think it doesn't do enough to set it apart from the pack to recommend everyone go buy this thing right fucking now as opposed to the original TWEWY, which I still recommend to people to this day. I can also do that with confidence because for an RPG with as complicated of a plot as it has, TWEWY doesn't take up that much time. NEO fucking does.

NEO is just kind of going for something different and I think it pulls that off. I kind of hinted at this earlier but it's just not as poignant as the original in any regard. Still, I don't want to give off the impression that this is a huge disappointment or total trash. I would love to keep playing the game, hardware willing, and I don't completely regret my purchase. Had I known my PS4 was going to physically reject the fucking thing, I probably wouldn't have pre-ordered it or waited for Switch reviews to get that version instead but you don't care about that so why am I even talking about it? NEO definitely takes characters and ideas from TWEWY in a way that is fun for veterans of the original game. However, I think I could still recommend NEO to newcomers because it does have its own story going on. In any case, I still recommend the original way higher than NEO. I still haven't played the Switch version of TWEWY but maybe I should finally do that sometime. That's still an option by the way if you want to play that first without dusting off your DS Lite or one of your 3 different Zelda-branded 3DS's. Or 2DS's. Nintendo's fucking silly. If you can play it without either console actively fighting back against you, I guess I soft recommend NEO. It's a solid action RPG with plenty of style to possibly make up for all of the things it really doesn't improve over my nostalgia-blind pedestal-hog vision of the original. If you already like the first game but are wary of trying NEO, ehhhhh. I think you'll like it but see if you can wait a bit longer for it to be like $40 or less.

Sorry, I drama'd (disjointed OneyPlays rant)

 https://twitter.com/RandomringsYT/status/1424442798099607557

That thread, assuming it still exists as you are reading this, is really all I have to say. But I'll say more because this is a blog!

So it's not a big secret to a lot of people that Oney or Chris O'Neil, or the guy that makes fun of Channel Awesome, or the Crash Bandicoot "woah" meme guy has had a history with some shit that some might call.... "problematic". I say that as a goof but also it's true.

Why am I ranting about this? Because I have no fucking life.

So here is the rant I made in case that thread I made gets yeeted:

Whhhooooops! I didn't even know about this when I made fun of his racist, misogynist let's plays with that one video I made. Nobody told me this. This was way back when.

So, I don't know why this is the last straw for me but like, I don't want to think about this guy anymore.

"This" is referring to a tweet Chris made on March 10th, promoting his brand-spanking new rarible account!

It sucks because I feel like he's not the worst person in the world. Like, his heart's in the right place but his brain is stuck in 2008 newgrounds and youtube.

Anyway, he's a stranger on the internet and I just wanted to rant about this before I shut up about him forever.

I have publicly said I watch "too much *neyPlays" for a few years now. I know it's easy to say this now but I mostly just like the people who aren't Chris? If that makes sense. Almost every time I've been annoyed with the channel is because of Chris.

Also, you can look up his screenname and "black lives matter" where he tries to back up calling the movement a "cult" and an "organization" that was attacking old men sitting in their cars or something? Yyyyyeah... It's yikers all around and I feel like a dumbass.

On top of that, I follow artists/animators who have been like "no, I indirectly know the guy and have seen him argue racist shit". One had discord screenshots. Way to be an ally to your POC friends and then do all that at the same time.

I couldn't find the discord screenshot but I found a conversation talking about middle eastern culture and Chris being a cunt about it. The fact that I believe this either means I'm an idiot or one dude kind of dug his own grave in terms of looking like he's learned anything from online criticism and the person I heard this allegory from is someone who does not have a history of using slurs for a quick lawl.

I don't know. Normally, I'm not that vocal about this sort of thing but I feel like I've mentioned Chris publicly a few times, some recently, and I just feel like a dumbass for not forgetting about the fucker sooner.

I genuinely hope he figures his shit out and gets better but he's a stranger on the internet so I'm not worried about it.

It just sucks that someone so genuinely multi-talented can also manage to be this stupid while calling other people "stupid ugly bitches" in the process.

If there's a positive to this, it's more inspiration for me to work on my let's plays and Randomrings videos. People can feel included or at least safe (hopefully both) with my stuff.

Theeeeeeeee end of the thread! :]

I don't have much to add to this other than I guess "evidence" in one place. Not all the evidence, mind you. When I said I don't have a life earlier, I was kind of exaggerating. Just a few things I want to document. Fun fact, I stumbled upon the NFT post looking for one of these specific things to edit into a video. Weirdly, not a lot of this stuff is the easiest to find. It's weird. When a Hollywood celebrity or queer YouTube creator does this stuff, you can find at least find 8 different posts about this kind of thing or whatever else but not much else. But I will put this here in case anyone is like "that didn't happen" or "he's an innocent baby boy, and I luv him!" or "it's the cansel coltcher!" Now others can go "well, I found this". I guess.

 I can't find the original tweet in anything that's not cropped or blurry like this but I've seen people talk about it in the past year and I saw it myself when he said it. It was in 2020 so read into that how you fucking will. Or tell yourself it's not racist because he didn't say the n-word. In this specific instance. I dunno. The point of this blog post isn't to convince you that he's a bigot, it's just to sort out my feelings on the guy after a long time of sitting on it. I'm happy to be the libcuck throwing themself under the bus to do so.

If you want more proof, watch any fucking Oneyplays that lasts 3 or more episodes since the channel's inception and you will find something ableist, racist, sexist, or a good ol' fashioned sexual assault joke!

https://youtu.be/3KMUtX8rwO4?t=1044

I particularly think of this one a lot because people use a certain excuse that this kind of debunks. "Well, he's friends with this person or these people and they're (not cishet white man) so he's fine! If he was a bigot, you would know" (literally just saw this as an actual argument on Tumblr AND Reddit by two separate people or a very dedicated idiot with different screennames). Well, that particular clip is with two gay people and he's just blurting the f-slur. This wasn't terribly long ago so you can't even make that bullshit excuse for him either, you know the one. There are multiple episodes I remember watching at least twice where they both call him out for this behavior. He still used the f-slur and r-slur in 2020 and 2021 episodes. Unfortunately I know that from directly watching them.

Anyway, this was too much time spent on a person on the internet I don't know personally. It's just weird because this is a guy a lot of people have been aware of for nearly 20 years now and I have found way more people defending his "political views" than I have found anyone going "nah, he's a bigot." Like, very VERY rarely do you see anyone just outwardly call him racist. I've seen it happen from some badasses but it's like once every three years where he does something stupider. I have also seen many people say today "he's just really stupid when it comes to these sorts of issues." What sort? Race? Then they continue to say "he should run his posts by someone else so he doesn't land in hot water". Bitch, I don't care how he *looks* in the public eye, it's about what he says and does as a public figure. If he wants to throw other people under the bus and goof on them for being idiots because "they're in the public eye and should learn how to take a joke" then I guess dunking on him should be perfectly fine. By his own logic. So anyone who tries to "defend" him or "debate" me probably just can't take a "joke". "Quotation marks".

Alright, time to expend my energy on literally anything else. This felt good. All I have to add is I have talked about OneyPlays specifically a few times, whether or not I have been critical of Chris's bigotry within the same instance. I guess I never really went out of my way to defend him in the past but I didn't outright condemn him until recently and I feel guilty for not starting a lot sooner I suppose.

Don't worry, you won't be hearing about this again. Thanks for your time and I hope this did something for you too. I say that a lot but this was a lot to take in with no real payoff from mentally consuming this. So I uh... superhope you got something out of this blog post in particular. Be safe!

Randomrings Streams Future and Past

 I've been keeping track of this so I guess you have the right to do so too. I've made it easier, I guess? This is also just to be a list of "hey, I'm going to stream this game at some point" for anyone who might want to know what kind of stuff I'm into streaming.

at https://www.twitch.tv/randomrings

You can also just go to my Backloggery profile to see this more in-depth

Last update: July 15, 2023

Current main series:

Lunistice

Lunistice is an indie collectathon platformer and it is really pretty.

Stuff I plan on streaming:

Pokemon Omega Ruby randomizer nuzlocke
Pokemon Ultra Sun randomizer nuzlocke (probably 2024)
Pokemon White - Mudkip's Path (randomizer nuzlocke) (continued)
Wandersong (continued)
More multiworld randomizers with my friends
    - I'll probably mostly play Sonic Adventure 2 but can also play the following:
        - Pokemon Emerald when it releases
        - The Messenger
        - Timespinner
        - Super Mario 64
Hades II whenever it goes into early access
Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster
Vampire Survivors (continued)
NEO: The World Ends With You (continued)
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line DLC
Cat Quest (continued)
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - 100%
Some new Multiworld game that I need to play vanilla
    - Hollow Knight
    - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
    - Super Mario World
    - Slay the Spire
    - Wargroove
    - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Games we have beaten on stream with links to the VODs in a new window:

Pokemon Emerald (technically randomized but vanilla logic) - April 2023 to May 2023
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (PS1) - March 2023
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age - January 2023 - February 2023
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg - December 2022
Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (Phantasy Reverie Series) - November 2022
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (Phantasy Reverie Series) - November 2022
Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment Again - October 2022
Bastion - September to October 2022
Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck - September 2022
Super Mario Sunshine - September 2022
Pokemon SoulSilver - July to September 2022
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity - June 2022
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
   -Spyro 1 and Spyro 2 - Mar 2022
   -Spyro 3 - Mar to May 2022
Pyre - Jan to Feb 2022
Transistor - November to December 2021
Panzer Dragoon: Remake - September 2021
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - August 2021
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing - August 2021
Undertale - July 2021
Sonic Colors - June 2021
Crash Bandicoot: Warped - June 2021
   -guest: Brad (B-Boi McB on YouTube)
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back - May 2021
Final Fantasy IX - May to November 2021
Timespinner - April to May 2021
   -guest: Satellite (thesatellite54 on Twitch)
Pokemon Diamond Nuzlocke (lost to Cyrus) - February to April 2021
   -occasional guest: Brad (B-Boi McB on YouTube)
Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment - Oct 2020

Accountability by Association rant I made

 I made this Twitter rant after I streamed last night. I don't know if I want this big wall of text on my Twitter for that long, especially something that people could easily misconstrue in tweet form. So I'm moving it here and then deleting it from Twitter.

The text is a little blurry on my end so to future-proof this as much as I can, I'm going to type out what they say here too:

Okay, maybe I'm fucking stupid but I feel like "you need to address this terrible thing this YouTuber did because you have kind of associated with them in the past or you are *just* as bad" is stupider than I am.

Probably not that black and white but a thread, if you will:

It's weird if they're *really* quiet about a certain topic. Like, if they're online friends with someone and have done a lot of videos and stuff together, then it turns out the one is a pedo. That might be worth addressing or at least cleaning up the channel.

What made me think about this enough to tweet about it is this; someone I follow is an artist who makes cool YouTube videos too. She was friends with and inspired by some popular asshole that I don't know much about but a lot of people liked this fucker who was recently outed.

Hey! Present-tense me again! Since we're not on Twitter anymore, I can address this without fanning a fire. The artist is Thumin. She makes really cool stuff. The "popular asshole", as I so eloquently put it, was Creepshow Art. I don't even know much about that one. I never followed her because everytime I hear about her it's just drama on top of drama. Turns out she has recently outdone herself in 2021. Thumin has been publicly linked with Creepshow so fans are lobbing questions and hatred at Thumin left and right instead of... y'know, the person actually being transphobic. Even beyond the transphobia and outing her own fucking sibling while they were in the ICU, I can't even follow the Degrassi bullshit she's been known for prior. So like, if you don't already know about it, feel free to look for Creepshow drama on your own. I don't even want to put out a source because I feel like anything I find could be misinformation. I have no idea what's up with this dummy. Thumin, however, I recommend following.

People are DMing and freaking out about this creator I follow that... isn't a freak by any means? They're yelling at her and sending racist shit to her trying to get her to address this other channel. They have cut off ties with their channel and the freak's channel anyway.

So here's the kicker of that story.

The event happened recently and this creator HAS addressed it on at least two different platforms, INCLUDING fucking YouTube where it would be the most publicly relevant.

To clarify because this seems so stupid that you might be thinking "no, I clearly read something wrong here". I would be. Thumin tweeted about this and put out one of those YouTube messagey thingies. Not a video. You know. That text thing you can do on YouTube so all your subscribers can see it.

The response was so prompt that it was how I found out about it happening

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for fans. At least up until yesterday, people have still been pestering her about the situation. I read her take on the whole thing. It isn't like 9 pages long or anything but I felt it was thorough enough. To loop back into the point of this whole blog post, I thought Thumin's post was more than what should have been expected.

Another reason I've been thinking about this kind of sensationalism recently, other than personal drama that doesn't need to be unleashed onto you guys, is that I've been pretty into Continue? recently.

If it isn't obvious, I have no connection to any of the channels or creators I am talking about here. My "personal drama" is what it sounds like and should be taken as such.

Continue? seems like a group of decent dudes. As far as white, cishet bros on the internet go, I feel pretty comfortable with them as an audience member and on a moral level.

But you probably know where I'm going with this:

n*rmalb**ts

"Normalboots".

For those of you too young to know about N*rmalb**ts; good. Half of the fuckers involved with it were shady at best. Two very popular ones are still going strong, one of them on Twitch as well. One is a white supremacist and the other sexually manipulates women and followers.

This is referencing "JonTron" or Jon Jafari who argued pretty strongly for strongly enforced immigration laws for the US and/or ethnic cleansing. When he caught flack for trying laughably to back up a lot of racist ideology, he made an "apology" video where he basically still tried to reinforce his points and said he would "stay out of politics". Idiot. The other idiot I'm referring to is ProJared or Jared Knabenbauer. That guy cheated on his wife with another YouTube creator who was, at the time, married to yet another YouTube creator, so the drama really splattered on all the walls that month. His wife partially found out about the events regarding the cheating because Jared also likes using his influence to solicit nudes from fans, some of which are under the age of 18. Back in the day, they all had this network called "Normalboots". JonTron, ProJared, and Continue? were all a part of this network. Normalboots basically kicked JonTron out by wording it in the most professional (i.m.o. pussy) way possible. Years later, people finally caught on to Jared's stink en masse. This caused Normalboots to disband entirely. Now you're up to speed on that. You can look up more details on your own but I think that was pretty comprehensive if I do say so myself.

Unfortunately, there are still videos with those people on Continue?. However, they have been increasingly making jokes against big conservative/centrist talking points for years, including all of the things those people and their current fans do.

Don't know why I worded this how I did. Probably just because I was in physical pain, it was late at night, and I was in full rant mode. Continue? had this thing back in the day called "Drunkstravaganza" where they would try to do their normal video game shtick but with guests. The first one was with JonTron. That's still on the channel. The second one was with a bunch of people, some shittier than others. If I remember correctly, JonTron was in that too but really all I remember is Satchell Drakes being there, a dildo on the wall, and Will Stamper's ass. Though it might be cool to see Continue? condemn Jon Jafari in a more specific way or see them at least remove the videos they are all in together, the points that make Jon Jafari's entire existence controversial are made fun of pretty frequently on Continue? They have progressively been harping on bigoted bullshit. I feel like if you know their heart is in the right place or at least they publicly condemn that behavior regularly, the argument of whether they should or shouldn't do something with their channel seems trivial to me. Vaguely irresponsible at worst.

Although I don't think Jared was ever in any of their videos, they mention him in a supportive fashion once or twice. I'm not sure if they still have those videos up. I wouldn't be surprised if they even remember mentioning him. However, after Jared's specific controversy, they make fun of him extensively for the specific bullshit he did in an episode not long after the public dust settled.

When the two were outed, they unfollowed the accounts and didn't say much. They don't directly talk about it (I'm unaware if they have) but they also don't condone the behavior actively. Unlike most big sketchy YouTubers, they make fun of similar idiots.

Is that not enough?

If you are actually a fan of the person or people, do you actually want accountability or do you want drama because you are on the internet and stirring the pot is something to do?

This is why I bring up Continue? In relativity, they are accountable for any remote association???

I won't bring up the one person I follow because that discourse is still burning. It is still current because people are perpetrating it. I don't see a logical reason why because again; they already addressed the fucking issue point-blank.

This is just bringing it all full-circle. I'm reiterating that Thumin was in the crosshairs of this sort of stupidity even after doing everything she could have done with the situation. What more do people want? Is it a video? Because that seems like you really want the spectacle more than you want some ambiguous sense of accountability.

In the case of Continue?, there is a greyer discussion. Although (to my knowledge) they didn't directly acknowledge everything, they still did most of what the end result would have been and try to culminate a diverse community that hates right-wing bigots.

For me, that's obviously enough or else I probably wouldn't still be watching and smmmmashing that liek buttin on Continue? videos.

They didn't "talk about it" but the end result is the same if they kinda do that all the time.

Even if you're going to argue "when it happened they shouldn't have stayed silent", they were still a part of Normalboots when both major controversies started actively buzzing. They helped come to the conclusion that action should be taken against them or at least stood by those actions. You wouldn't be wrong though. They could have done more. Still, unlike politically and morally ambiguous channels with a big following, Continue? have made their stances on a lot of issues pretty well known in their regular content. This is why I thought they were such a good example to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I dunno. Just something I've been mulling over.

I truly don't believe there's a concrete right or wrong answer to any of this.

On the other hand, I feel like some people are just not satisfied with what strangers online do in reaction to other strangers online.

Some are irresponsible (like p*wd**piss). I get that.

Just mathematically, I bet a lot of you went through a shitty fucking Pewdiepie, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, Cryaotic or however you spell that, CinnamonToastKen phase. People don't fucking call Markiplier or Jacksepticeye nazis for not calling Pewdiepie anti-semitic, even though Felix is definitely anti-semitic. So either we're all flawed and this whole "guilty by association" mentality is pretty fucking toxic and pointless or you are the god of morality and I deserve to burn eternally for even going down this line of thought.

That's my soapbox for the night. I can't think of any more points to add that aren't kind of redundant. Hopefully, you got something out of this spiel. Something to think about.

Yeah, that sums it up. I figured it would be easier to clear some of my points up on almost anything other than Twitter. I'm going to go delete those tweets now. Stay safe and healthy out there. I mean on the internet but I guess that goes for your life not spent on the internet as well.