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why-so-serious-lucifer · 5 months

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K-pop Discography Deep Dives: Jonghyun

Since this is a very special review, I wanted to start off not with my “credentials” or with a disclaimer but with a story. I’ve been a casual k-pop fan since early 2019 and a deeper fan since March of the year after, when I discovered Red Velvet. In late November of 2020, during lockdown, I lost one of the people I loved most in the world. I was still a teenager (barely younger than Jonghyun was when he debuted in SHINee), and I felt alone and isolated, and I became depressed. And just three weeks later, on December 18th, I was scrolling on social media when I came across posts memorializing Jonghyun. I had heard him mentioned, through Yeri of RV, but had never taken the time to listen, and I finally did.

I saw people mourning, people celebrating, and most of all, people remembering. The k-pop world had just lost two more idols to suicide, Sulli and Hara, and the messages surrounding mental health had never been stronger. It was this that got through to me, like a lightbulb going off, and I went, “Shit, I think I have depression.” And I started taking medication. Now, I’m not going to credit him with saving my life because I have no idea what would’ve happened, but I try to continue what he did for me. But all I can do is what all of us can do, which is remember who he was, respect the art he created, and continue the great advocacy he started. So, in this review, I’m trying to do all three, and I’d love it if you came along with me.

Crazy (Guilty Pleasure) is first on the list, and immediately had me feeling nostalgic. There’s something about his voice that’s so instantly recognizable, and a song like this that oscillates between his more subdued style and the strong emotions of the chorus fits it so well. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the rap, probably because of the vocalizing behind it, which helped it blend in seamlessly. On the whole, I liked this one! Its strings and immaculate sense of drama reminded me of Taylor Swift’s Don’t Blame Me.

Deja Boo begins with Jonghyun’s classic sound of smooth R & B and his crooning voice. I enjoyed the constant starting and stopping of the instrumental, as it made what could be a boring song far more interesting, and while I’m not usually a fan of rapping or choruses so heavy on vocalizing, I actually liked both here, since they felt like they were there because they fit the song and not because someone thought that they “should” be. The “Okay, next” at the end gave me a good chuckle

It’s a testament to how strong this first EP is that, before this deep dive, I had no idea which of these songs were actually the title track. Beautiful Tonight’s distinctive whistling hook, Hallelujah’s beautiful gospel choir back-up, and Love Belt’s gentle words (and references to a real car accident that Jonghyun was in) all do something unique with what could be such simple R & B melodies, ensuring that the piece feels cohesive but never same-y. My favorite was definitely Neon, though, whose funky catchiness snuck up on me, and I ended up replaying it twice.

End Of A Day has always been one of my favorite singles of Jonghyun’s, and I’m not alone. There are few songs as heartfelt, and led by only his quiet, comforting voice and a gentle piano, it feels like a warm hug from someone you love. Telling the listener to “lean on my shoulder” and “let me cheer you up”, it features Jonghyun at perhaps his most earnest. I paused what I was doing for a few minutes just to appreciate the peace that this one radiates, and take a deep breath in and out.

The Collection “Story Op.1” is so called because it was written by Jonghyun based on the stories the listeners of his radio show Blue Night confided in him; it’s a very special album for that reason, because it truly feels like a group effort between him and fans. I enjoyed U & I’s sprightly piano, interesting percussion, and cozy guitar, Diphylleia Grayi’s gorgeously sad lyrics and strings, the falling rain sound effects and comfortable energy of 02:34 (which I think was my favorite), and the interpolated phone conversation in Maybe Tomorrow. This is one of my favorite albums of his, and has some of his most excellent imagery.

She Is, despite being super popular, is not a song of his I’ve listened to much. It leans more into funk and is lighter than his other singles (Crazy, End Of Day, Lonely, and Shinin’), being about having a crush. It’s a nice break from the sadder and darker aspects of his discography, and it’s also really catchy. I even liked the sing-talk aspects, though my favorite part was definitely the vocalizing in the post-choruses.

From the She Is album, I liked the “you, you, you” and finger-snapping in White T-Shirt, the ethereal quality of Moon, the layers of falsetto vocalizing in Aurora, the intentional vocal fry and minimalistic background of Cocktail, the sped-up quality of Red, and the vulnerability in Suit Up.

I admit that when listening to the She Is album, a part of me had forgotten the reason I was doing this review in the first place, but Lonely had me remember immediately. Lonely is, in hindsight, both gut wrenching and haunting, with its lyrics about feeling isolated and alone. It’s a beautiful song, don’t get me wrong—the piano is so lovely and Taeyeon and Jonghyun’s voices work beautifully together, each making the other sound richer—but it’s one of those tracks that you just can’t listen to more than once in a while.

The Collection “Story Op.2” follows where the first collection left off, with more stories inspired by the callers on his radio show. I enjoyed the calm guitar of 1000 and the gentle groove of Just Chill, but Let Me Out has been one of my favorite songs since the first time I heard it. It’s one of the most genuine, gripping, painfully open k-pop ballads I’ve seen, and it never fails to make me want to reach through the screen and say “No.”. Overall, though, this album is definitely a more subdued and peaceful album, although I might be imagining more melancholy with the benefit of hindsight.

Less than eight months after the release of his second collection was, again, December 18th, 2017. It’s a day that’s become so infamous that in the k-pop community just saying “December 18th” will likely get your message across. It gives me no joy to say that he had a plan; his last album, Poet | Artist was released just a month after he left the world; a final gift to the fans who had watched him grow up for both so long and not nearly long enough.

Shinin’ is the single from the album, and uses a glowing, minimalistic electronic synth background that expands with some percussion in its choruses. Jonghyun’s voice is at some of its smoothest here. It’s one of those songs that’s happy and sad at the same time, and its happiness feels…muted? It’s hard not to be emotional when the song ends with “always be with you, you, you.” Without the story behind it, it’s a simple love song. With it, it’s a promise that he’s managed to keep for the last six years. I do admit that I got a good laugh out of the super 80’s animation, though.

Before Our Spring wasn’t intended to be a single, but after his passing, SM Entertainment decided to make it a tribute video for him. It follows in the footsteps of End Of Day, as it’s a peaceful, piano-led ballad, but undeniably heartbreaking: “Before spring comes, before the sun rises, I’ll meet you when everyone is asleep. I’m okay, don’t worry, spring will come to me too.” I hope it does. Depending on the day, sometimes I listen to it and feel comforted, and sometimes I listen to it and just feel heartbroken. Thankfully, watching it with the video made it just a little easier. It’s good to hear him laugh.

Poet | Artist is Jonghyun’s last, posthumous album, and is one of his strongest. I loved the disco-y synths of Only One You Need, the tongue-in-cheek humor of #Hashtag, the chorus’ explosion in Grease, the ethereal encouragement in Take The Dive, the brighter and funkier delivery of Sightseeing, and the quietly anthemic quality of Just For A Day.

My top 5 songs from Jonghyun are End Of Day, Only One You Need, Take The Dive, Hallelujah, and U & I, with Neon and Let Me Out as honorable mentions. Jonghyun’s work gets a 9.25 out of 10 from me, which is probably about as surprising as TWICE announcing a comeback. In all seriousness though, I know that I’m super biased, but hey, we started with a sob story and that’s how we’re going to end.

I can’t really put into words the feelings I have about this review. Writing it has reminded me how grateful I am, not only that I found Jonghyun and his story, not only that I became a Shawol, but that I became a k-pop fan in general. As Jonghyun wrote in his book (which I haven’t been able to find a full English translation of yet, but I’m still trying), “Even though we can’t communicate using the same language, we use music instead.”

Jonghyun broke boundaries in k-pop, with his openness, his self-producing, his prolific writing, and his advocacy. Both our community and the world as a whole was very lucky to have him for as long as we did, which still wasn’t nearly long enough. He changed the lives of so many people—he changed mine, without me even knowing who he was at the time he passed away—and overall, he made the world just a little easier for everybody else, no matter how hard it was for himself. All this is to say, he did very, very well.

I’ll be taking a break next week because it’s the holidays, so I’ll see you again in the new year for a girl group, folks. Thank you so much for reading, and please, take care. Tschüss, und Fröhliche Weihnachten (Happy Holidays)!

#k-pop #review #k-pop deep dive #k pop boy groups #Jonghyun #SHINee #Onew #Taemin #Minho #key #shining #Shinin #let me out #lonely #end of day #she is #depression #tw: suicide mention #Spotify

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faith--in-the-future · 1 year

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i’m waiting for the review 🫡🤭

HERE I AM!!

AOTV SPOILERS BELOW!

omg I loved it!! Like overall it was so beautifully done and u can really see it was done with care and thoughtfulness! it follows the timeline chronologically pretty well although it kind of goes 2010 to 2016 and then skips to 2019 to 23 so that gap kind of stays unknown but it is said that those were very difficult years for louis.

it starts with the 1d stuff and it goes pretty deep in how louis lived the beginning and the end of it! like we hear the story of how he didn't sing at all in wmyb and how he had worked with the producer for the 2nd single and they worked hard to get his verse right and then in the final cut he found out that they had given it to harry (😑) and how at that moment he felt like no matter what he did it wasn't gonna be good enough :( but that's also how he started writing bc all he ever wanted was to feel like he had a place in the band :( and then it cuts to 2015 and their last performance and there's a very telling video of him after the performance and he was so fucking sad (also I wonder what that footage was for ? bc it looked like they were making something then too) and in the voice-over he says that he was feeling angry and lost bc he felt like he finally had his place and he didn't want it to end (!!!) and then OLI MY BEST FRIEND!! says how only certain band members wanted it to end but louis didn't (we been knew but I'm glad oli is well aware and not scared to say it) and then we even hear lottie and his grandparents talk about the huge loss that losing 1d was for him.

I actually found it interesting that they had that first segment about 1d then right after his mom and then felicitè and they talked about all of those as the most important losses of louis' life so u really can see how big of a loss the breakup was for him :/ it was truly a part of him

then there's the part about his mum with his grandparents talking and I legitimately cried when his grandpa was talking bc it was all so sad and touching but also u can really feel how much they LOVE and admire louis and in general in all the family clips and interviews u really see how he is the core of his whole family and how much he loves them all. it's so beautiful

I loved the bits with his sisters too! the twins talked about how much he looks after them and how sometimes he's a bit too much but it's only bc he cares so much :(( and lottie said "he was made to be a big brother for many sisters " and I was like SO TRUE !!!! he literally is ! and helene called him GENTLE AND KIND !! which is also SO TRUE 😭😭 I love him sm

also I was surprised that they talked more about felicite bc he never said anything but God :( lottie talked about how louis and her tried to help her and how guilty she felt bc she couldn't and how louis must have felt it even more 😔😔

and in the middle of all of the parts there's oli interviews which are the best bc he truly gives such an insight on louis and like u can totally see why they're so close !! he understands louis a lot ! and he even says his job is to try to keep louis' life together lmao 😭😭

I loved the part about the beginning of the walls era bc u see how difficult that was for him and many aspects of it was stuff that we didn't know about! like there are clips from some of the earlier promo performance where Louis says that he hated it and hated performing and u can really see how much he beat himself up for his mistakes and that only starts changing with the ccme performance and then only at the Scala gig he's like I actually loved that!! I was really surprised about that like I had guessed from his stage presence and in general by everything that he wasn't really comfortable but he literally says taht at one point he couldn't wait to get out :(( and helene is like that's what u need to work on bc u actually love singing!! and u can see how it all changes with tour and how much she was right bc his voice keeps getting better as he gets happier mentally <3 the body truly does keep the score of our trauma!

I also loved the band bits and u can see how significant it is for the guys that louis sleeps in the same bus as them and involves them in day off activities and how tight and loving the atmosphere is on tour

also the fans interviews were lovely!! I especially liked a segment they did on how fans formed friendships and lived great experiences through the fandom and louis! u can really see how much louis loves that and it's beautiful bc it just reinforces one of louis' core messages which is how important people and love are <33

the entire Freddie segment was BEAUTIFUL it is the part that my non louie friend was most impressed by bc u can really tell how much louis loves him and vice versa, also how important Freddie is for him! and he's such A GOOD DAD!! so loving and affectionate, he is always telling him that he loves him and asking for kisses and it was so 😭 that kid will be such a wonderful person. and louis even showed him that he was crying after the la show bc he saw him in the crowd ! :(( truly beautiful (and great parenting especially for a boy!)

there wasn't a lot about his career difficulties (as I expected) but it's still hinted at that he had more than one issue with the labels and all that side of things :/ also found it interesting that helene mentioned that people in management etc in 1d didn't like him bc they thought he was arrogant and wanted to be the front man when all he was arguing for was just Equal and fair opportunities and even his grandparents talk about how it wasn't fair how he was treated in the band and that even if louis didn't talk about it they could see it hurt him... sigh

I'm sure I'll remember more as soon as I post it but for now I think that's enough skdk it's beautiful! it's telling and it's real ! go watch it and enjoy louis in all his wonderful aspects!

also there are the parts about liam at ccme and niall in Mexico and they talk about when louis went to see him etc and it was interesting how niall seemed awkward in front of the camera talking about it lol? meanwhile it was sad when louis watched liam the first night and then louis was in his room and he asked if he'd stay to watch him but liam had to fly to LA :/// kind of explains how all of them have treated louis for all these years tbh, maybe that's what triggered that apology from liam and tbh louis definitely deserves one from all of them .

#ask #anon #AOTV SPOILERS

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months

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By: Benjamin Ryan

Published: Feb 24, 2024

The movement backing gender-transition treatment for children is built on the claim that pediatric medical interventions are not only “medically necessary” – but truly “life saving.”

However, no researchers have ever tried to figure out whether this claim is true.

Until now.

A major new study out of Finland found that providing cross-sex hormones and gender-transition surgeries to adolescents and young adults didn’t appear to have any significant effect on suicide deaths.

What’s more, gender distress severe enough to send young people to a gender clinic wasn’t independently linked to a higher suicide death rate either.

What was independently tied to a greater chance of suicide in young adults?

A high number of appointments with mental-health specialists; in other words, severe mental health challenges.

And so, the researchers concluded two things: One, that suicide deaths were higher, but still rare in gender-distressed young people.

And two, that this group’s higher suicide rate was tied to the fact that they had a higher rate of severe psychiatric problems, not to their gender distress.

What these young people need most urgently, the study authors concluded, is comprehensive mental health care – and not necessarily controversial medical interventions.

This study gets to the heart of a fierce debate: Whether trans-identified youths’ high rate of mental health problems is mostly caused by society’s harsh judgment of trans people.

Or whether, as many skeptics argue, at least some young people might identify as trans as a way of dealing with mental health issues that are not driven by gender identity.

Erica Anderson, a trans woman, psychologist and the former head of USPATH, part of the trans-medicine association WPATH, said the new Finnish study is “going to make a big splash.”

She frowned upon a reportedly common question gender clinics ask of on-the-fence parents: “Would you rather have a living son or dead daughter?”

“It is most unethical to say that kind of thing to parents,” said Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, leader of the new study, published Feb. 17, and top adolescent psychiatrist at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital. “It’s not based on facts.”

Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender-affirmation surgeon and president of WPATH, said it was time to refocus the conversation on medical interventions for young people.

Because “suicide is and has always been a poor way of measuring the efficacy of gender-affirming care,” she said.

Dr. Kaltiala’s research findings fly in the face of a vast and powerful coalition of supporters of gender-transition treatment for young people, who all claim it is life saving – including WPATH, major U.S. medical societies like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the ACLU, and LGBTQ groups like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign.

Dr. Kaltiala was once herself a supporter of gender-transition treatment for adolescents.

She launched one of Finland’s first pediatric gender clinics in 2011, but soon started having doubts.

Since then, multiple teams of researchers have systematically reviewed the available studies about gender-transition medicine for kids.

They all found the science subpar and uncertain.

For her new study, Dr. Kaltiala’s team relied on Finland’s nationalized health records.

They examined records on all 2,083 people who had their first visit to either of the nation’s two gender clinics at age 22 or younger—at 18 on average and as young as eight—from 1996 to 2019.

These researchers put together a comparison group of nearly 17,000 Finns. This included eight people for each gender-distressed person, matched to their age and birthplace.

There was an average of nearly 7 years of health information on each person, through June 2022.

Thirty-eight percent of the gender-distressed youths went on cross-sex hormones or received gender-transition surgeries.

Many started this treatment before age 18, Dr. Kaltiala said.

There were 55 deaths.

Twenty were suicides, including 7, or 0.3 percent, of the gender-distressed youths and 0.1 percent of the comparison group.

The findings that neither going to a gender clinic nor undergoing gender-transition treatment was tied to an independent significant difference in the suicide rate built on a 2023 study by Dr. Kaltiala.

That paper showed that after people received gender-transition treatment, they didn’t then see psychiatric specialists any less often.

This suggested that the treatment didn’t improve their mental health.

“We must not think that gender-reassignment alone is all the help that they need,” Dr. Kaltiala said of gender-distressed youths.

Paul Garcia-Ryan, president of Therapy First, which calls for counseling as the priority treatment for youth gender distress, pointed to guidelines that say journalists and doctors shouldn’t oversimplify suicide or say it’s an expected response to any one factor.

Doing so, Mr. Garcia-Ryan said, might actually cause “or worsen suicidal thoughts in vulnerable young people.”

It remains to be seen whether supporters of access to gender-transition medicine for teens will take the Finnish study’s findings to heart.

GLAAD, for one, has claimed that the “science is settled” regarding the benefits of such treatment.

But the science is complex and ever-evolving.

Groundbreaking and data-driven, these Finnish studies strongly suggest that the time has come to move away from claims that medical interventions are life saving for young people and increase the support for mental health care instead.

https://epi.washington.edu/news/gender-affirming-hormones-and-puberty-blockers-improve-mental-health-in-transgender-youth/

https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/legal-documents/051-1_Jack_Turban_Declaration.pdf

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/518954-vote-for-gender-affirmation-life-and-death-choice/

All of this reporting flouts established guidelines for reporting suicide, which is known to have a social contagion aspect to it.

Make no mistake, the narrative around "trans kid or dead kid" is not simply an accident of people not understanding guidelines for reporting about suicide. It's deliberate.

It's not just about manipulating parents into thinking they're going to lose their child if they don't comply with activist-driven medicalization, although that's certainly an objective.

It's also about terrifying people who think they're "trans" that if they don't get these drugs and surgeries, they'll kill themselves, and any attempts to sanely control this ongoing medical scandal are a calculated attempt to kill them. That's what the mythical "trans genocide" is about.

If we're being truly cynical, it almost seems like they want kids to kill themselves, to create a "Trans Floyd" moral panic and a 2020-like "reckoning."

#Benjamin Ryan #trans or suicide #suicide #mental health #mental health issues #gender ideology #queer theory #gender identity ideology #trans genocide #medical scandal #medical malpractice #medical corruption #religion is a mental illness

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7grandmel · 4 months

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Todays rip: 19/01/2024

Fragile Snowman (Remastered)

Season 3 Featured on: Inspector Gunner 2 With Critic

Ripped by MtH, IAmMelloYello, Chaze the Chat

youtube

Following up directly on yesterday's post, one of the most notable events that happened during Season 3, one that was covered with a lot of love by the SiIvaGunner team in MAGFest 2019: SiIvaGunner Presents - High Quality Ripping, was the Nostalgia Critic takeover. Somehow, despite running the blog for half a year's time at this point, I still haven't ever gotten to touch on this event, despite being one of the more fondly remembered parts of the Season. And, well, there IS kind of a reason for that?

See, what initially started as an event celebrating old YouTube reviewers in general (hence Inspector Gadget's presence during it and in the album), transitioned into a purely-Nostalgia Critic event - but rather than celebrating Doug Walker's legacy in particular, the takeover took a different approach. Playing on Walker's gimmick as a reviewer in particular, the event was focused specifically on being a "nostalgia"-event - in other words, aiming to specifically bring us in the audience back to the days of Season 1 through every rip uploaded. This theme wasn't quite as...immediately apparent as many other takeovers, be it with rips like Totally Shaaking Out Right Now in the Harlem Shakeover, or Fell From a High Place (Reprise) during the Minecraft music event. Because while those events pretty radically changed to a core theme, this nostalgia-themed event instead saw the channel return to a status quo it once had - reuploads of several prior-lost Season 1 rips, new rips that were intentionally simplistic and often off-key, and an overall focus on the kinds of jokes that were all the rage in Season 1.

It was a genuinely really fun time, yet it was simultaneously hard to think of a fitting rip to represent it all with - in my eyes, it's one of those events that only truly worked in the moment, surrounded by all these rips that formed a cohesive whole. But Fragile Snowman (Remastered) is as close as it gets, I think - a loving remake of a true classic of Season 1. I've talked before of just how much I love it when rips of all sorts get dug back up for another shot at live with Violet Snow Memories from earlier this year, and this event was really the first time that we ever got a concentrated dose of that feeling throughout an entire takeover - and despite the rip of today's post only being two years old at that point, the nostalgia for it had already set in for me.

As described by Chaze the Chat in the aforementioned MAGFest panel, a big part of the fun with Season 1 was its sense of...spontaneousness, that you never really knew what to expect due to there simply not being much of any expectations set up by prior channel history in the first place. And as a result, we got a lot of rips much like the original Fragile Snowman - a mashup between Snowman as featured in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Fragile by Tech N9ne. There's a lot of rips like this even today, mashing up more chill video game music with hip-hop music that doesn't necessarily have much memetic quality, and while a lot of them can slip through the cracks of the SiIvaGunner audience, Fragile Snowman really did stick - enough to warrant two remasters made of it, with Fragile Snowman (Remastered) being the final stop the rip's made thus far.

There's so many small things fixed and tweaked in this final remastered version, yet it still sounds exactly as you'd imagine a mashup between the two songs to sound - which is, really, the best tell for it being an excellent remaster. The Nostalgia Critic takeover, while less bombastic and loud than many other events, was one that most every SiIvaGunner fan loved specifically because it focused on something we were ALL fans of - SiIvaGunner itself - and reminded us of just how far we'd come in just two short years. All these years later, there was indeed another event somewhat similar to this Nostalgia Critic takeover that happened just recently in Season 7, but...that's a story for another time.

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bereft-of-frogs · 11 days

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friday! 🌿

books:

(in progress) Salvation Day - Kali Wallace: I have started and not finished this book like 4 times. Which is probably a bad sign because I also didn't love the other book by this author I read. I've heard this is better though. But I couldn't pick anything else, officially DNF'd Kill Show, I skimmed a couple pages of the other book I took out of the library and I think I'm too much in A Mood to read it, so I am attempting this again.

(in progress) The Rising Storm - Cavan Scott: Not much to say, chugging along with catching up on the High Republic, extremely slowly. I'm just happy Bell and Indeera are back! Love them.

(finished) The Hobbit: Not my favorite, but I feel like it's good to revisit occasionally. Still hilarious when Tolkien kind of slips into that super epic fantasy voice, and then goes right back into 'kids adventure' tone

(in progress) The Silmarillion: Ngl, part of this reread is fueled by that person on the 'have you read this fantasy book' who for some reason didn't believe that 300 people (based on the results at the time of their comment) read The Silmarillion and accused us all of lying for clout. (which like...clout? what clout? why would I lie about this?) So I'm reading it again.

tv:

Constellations (AppleTV+): I LOVE this. LOVE it. I mean I'm always a sucker for space ghosts so that was a given, but this is really fun. The lost cosmonaut stuff, communicating through tapes, the fairy tale like elements. I love it Also my toxic trait is basically any multiverse thing I judge based on whether or not I think it could be a branch of The OA's multiverse tree and this passes that test, you can easily imagine Brit Marling and Jason Issacs chasing each other around the universes just off-screen. I only have one episode left, really interested to see where things are going (still wondering who the 'ghost' who appeared when the Soyuz disengaged from the ISS was, I have a Theory, but I'm not sure yet). Also bonus point for having some absolutely genuinely creepy scenes. I am so desensitized, it's always really fun when something manages to unsettle me.

You (Netflix): Trash fave, this is my current 'while I'm cooking/eating dinner' show, it's so cheesy but I love it. I never watched the latest season but revisiting season 1 is fun.

Under the Bridge (Hulu): Yeah so episode 1 I was like 'oh old friends? that would be hot. they'll never do it' and then episode 3 was like 'yeah they're *old friends* *wink* *they make out*' and I was like OH OK.

film:

They Cloned Tyrone (2023): I love movies where at the climax everything seems to go wrong and then it rewinds and shows you how it's really all going according to plan. Also, this was brilliant for the plan basically revolving around the villains seeing what they wanted to see, and the protagonists playing into that. And it recreated the vibe of those 70s exploitation films so well.

Palm Springs (2020): This kept appearing on 'what time loop media is your favorite' polls so I thought I'd rewatch it. Still SUCH a fun time loop movie. I did vote for it in both polls, despite the second also having 'that one episode of supernatural' as a possibility.

The Grudge (2019): ABYSMAL. Like truly terrible. I'm not saying the original US remakes were good, but they do have a special place in my heart because they were some of the first movies to really scare me. And also I thought maybe this wouldn't be so bad, I liked the Netflix Ju-On: Origins series that came out in 2020 fine despite it not getting very good reviews. But no. In this case, the reviews were correct, this was awful. In the running for the worst movie of the year and it's barely May.

The Stranger (2020): Maika Monroe has such a weird typecasting haha but I don't hate it. I learned that this was apparently supposed to be a Quibi series and was stitched back together after the fall of Quibi. It probably would have been more effective as short form content. I probably would have ate it up. But as a film it just felt like 'ok wtf is going on'.

to do:

work day: I'm hoping to get through my tasks fast so I can write on the clock. ('doesn't that mean you should be doing them and not making this post?' SILENCE.)

oh man so much writing because I set myself a deadline so now. there's that. well ok it is self-imposed and if things do go catastrophically wrong, I can JUST post the first chapter. That's for sure ready. ideally though: finish the last 2.5 chapters this weekend -> resolve comments (most of which are just 'come up with secondary character name', 'check spelling on wiki', but there is one I know I have to be clever for which...we'll see how clever I can be) -> full read-through. I'll eventually (sooner rather than later) have to rewrite the action sequences of chapter 9, but I think that should be enough to make me feel like I can start weekly posting.

I might go to my favorite thrift store tomorrow to look for some 'person who cares about their job' dresses/blouses/idk for annual corporate socializing event week

Star Wars day! lol remember how exactly a year ago I was like 'idk man, it's star wars day but I'm really not feeling it' and then had to eat my words like literally less than two weeks later? that was funny. cheers to that. Meeting my dad and brother at the movie theater and then we're going out for pizza just like it's 1999 (ok my brother was not actually there in 1999 because he was 4, but we welcome him to the nostalgia trip)

the monthly Big Clean (aka I fell behind on recycling so I have to take a lot down to the recycling bins, and the vacuum and mop are coming out)

pretend to care about my job for 3 days. Ok, no, I do care about my job in that I actually do like it and I want to do a good job, I just don't really care about like...*the company*. but I will get a lot of free food and probably wine if I pretend to care about the company for 3 days. so. fair exchange.

#the friday list #lists lists lists

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protect-daniel-james · 5 months

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10 26 for the AO3 year in review game?

Thank you!

10. What work was the quickest to write?

Oh, either Just or Bite Hard. These two I wrote at the time I was desperate with my thesis, but I just couldn't let these two ideas rot away in my WIPs. Just is a very short story, I just randomly thought one day that Frank would be absolutely into the whole "just the tip" and "don't worry I won't cum inside" (well, doesn't really matter that much with Mason but anyway... just for the dirty talk), and I had to write it. Just the sleazy, desperate stuff he would come up with to keep Mason close...

And Bite hard is a one-shot thing, Pedri/Gavi are just simply easy to write (they have quite a well-established dynamic, I'm not going anywhere with the fics about them, and I know that they will get lots of hits/kudos no matter how average they are story- and storytelling- wise lmao.).

26. What's your most common category?

M/M, no warnings, teen and up, established relationship, lmao. That sounds very vanilla, doesn't it! My most written-about ship is still Modrić/Rakitić, I love it. It's the ship I "made my name with" lmao. (it was the first era, back in 2018. then I kinda backed off, and came back fully during summer 2019 - that was the summer when United bought Daniel James, hence my nickname and this blog. and then I started posting on AO3 regularly again, just not about Rakidrić - as much - anymore).

Just to give you a rundown of the most used tags: established relationship, angst, fluff, unhealthy relationships, coach/player relationship. I think that paints the picture quite well. I'm not a huge fan of "getting together" fics, because - as I learned in Barcelona - then it leaves you with a question - what do you do then? is the "getting together" a big finale? where do you go from there? so the characters in my fics are mostly in a state of their relationship falling apart, or it's never truly a relationship - e. g. Scamacca/Paquetá. Or I can't be bothered trying to come up with an idea of how their relationship started because it would be too sappy and unrealistic - Westwood/Barnes are like that; I can see them as a couple, but I can't see them...discussing it, getting together, having a first kiss.

EDIT omg I figured maybe I should do this question just for the year right? one sec I'll try to figure it out so we can see how it rates among all the fics

okay so for 2023 it's:

M/M, no warnings, mature, established relationship, and my most-written about pairing is Eddie Howe/Jason Tindall! (with a whole lot of 4 fics!)

just to be clear my tags got this year: established relationship, masturbation, coach/player relationship, family dynamics, power imbalance. hello, Lampardverse!

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mayordoi · 5 months

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huzzah! 2023 art review!

it’s almost the end of the year, wowzers! i always do one of these art review thingies since i always like looking back at the art ive made :> last year i posted the review on my other account and left it at there, but this year i want to actually review each month and notable pieces i made… just for fun!

this post is very much just for me lol, but i hope someone out there enjoys it. month-by-month review + previous year in reviews will be under the cut! 🩷

(also, shoutout to tumblr for going rouge and posting this way way earlier than i had scheduled 😍 luckily tumblr post editor is weirdly based and kept all my embedded links when i pasted it from the old one? hell yeah)

Jan: started off the year with a painting of my beloved ocs after ending last year with one! (and i will be talking about my older year in reviews, rest assured). this was my obligatory cute shared scarf art, and i wanted to try attempting to render something more involved like two characters and draping cloth. i don't think the result was too shabby, though this was before i discovered my favorite rendering brush for procreate, so in hindsight, it looks kinda flat and boring now. where's all the crunch? ah but anyway, starting a whole year with your art in a mid place compared to what you made later on is par for the course.

Feb: probably the month where i had the least art to put here, i remember scraping a little to find one. this was a chrobin piece i made in my sketchbook! nothing too noteworthy... i think i tried doing a slightly different approach to coloring with markers (applying the color before the lineart) and incorporating paint, but i remember this one giving me trouble. first of all, the size i drew this in was really small (it was in a small sketchbook and i decided to mask the margins with comparatively wide masking tape), and second of all the paper was absolutely NOT built for gouache, so it ended up a kind of wrinkly and muddy mess. i mean i'm still not the best with gouache now but still, not my best.

March: a redraw of a robin piece i made back when i was still on amino. i probably won't share the old versions because they're crap, so just trust me on the redraw part. anyway, the last iteration of the concept was in 2019 i think? and while i was proud of it for a while, its luster finally faded and i decided to try doing it again in procreate. this was when i discovered my love for the soft chalk brush in the jingsketch basics brush pack. for a while i've been using the hard render brush in that pack to render, but this one's texture and chalkiness totally changed the game. i was in love!! also tried to be a little more crazy and vibrant with how i applied the base colors, using saturated colors across the board. this process didn't consistently stick, but i think it yielded some neat results here. another hit from this month was my piece of grandmaster robin, since i'm really proud of the detail here!.

Apr: guys, april was MY MONTH! i remember making so much art in just a few weeks, something just clicked in my brain i guess. i chose my drawings of hagane rin and len since this was when i truly began to get comfy in my lineart era (after the grandmaster drawing). this month was full of detailed line drawings at that, but this one was what made me both enjoy the process a lot and do more of it. hell yeah. other hits: vocaloids at mcdonald's (i drew a background omg!!!), alice in ny fanart (just the euphoria of finally nailing a composition for this piece after struggling with it in november was great), and the end-world normopathy fanart (it's a line drawing, and a traditional one at that. i was happy with incorporating gold accents into my typically monochromatic style when it comes to my line-focused drawings as well as getting tamari's mechanical details nailed).

May: hell yeah. evil power couple time. this one was another line-art heavy one since i thought it fit the vibe. the softer colors in the background i feel like could have been executed a little better, but i do like how this came out, especially the armor (good god fe armor is a pain to render, but i think i've gotten better at it this year! middle school me would be so jealous). not much else to say here. Other hit this month would be my alice of human sacrifice fanart, another line-heavy traditional drawing. i think it turned out nice, especially for a crammed composition lol.

Jun: another end-world normopathy-centered fanart. i mentioned it in my og post but i was trying out a slightly different painting style where i did a black-and-white base first and then added colors as an overlay (also in the initial upload of the post i was so fucking meek about posting fanart of mariyam's alternate design teased at the end of the mv?? 😭 sorry about that, i've edited it out but it's still in early reblogs. kind of cringe on my part). i didn't end up committing to this consistently cuz the beginning process was kind of tedious (plus i'm too inept to pay close attention to values anyway), but laying down all the colors after the long rendering process was rewarding! it's a nice alternative with i get bored with my other method to yield basically the same-looking result lol. this month featured some more pieces that tried using this process, like the one with my oc alice, lucina and dark pit hanging out, and f!robin's resplendent design from feh.

Jul: ah yes my typical flavor of "improvised oc art that i invent new symbolism for on the fly that i apply meaning to after i'm finished". kinda just wanted to paint something again because i've been doing a lot of line drawings lately and to go back to my old painting process again. honestly, i mainly picked this one because i wanted more oc art and non-lineart drawings to be in this chart lol. art i made this month that i'm real proud of is this family pic of some young cryptonloids (i really like how the colors came out on this one!) and my birthday drawing for miku's sweet 16, which was originally completed this month. i opted out of considering it for my july art to avoid confusion. also also, this very whack pathological facade fanart (plus some doodles i didn't post) opened my eyes to the beautiful world of NOISE and HALFTONES and just slapping crazy textures onto my art like nobody's business. hell yeah.

Aug: ok this one is kind of another piece i picked to represent this month that isn't quite my favorite but i chose anyway for the sake of variety (in this case, i wanted more traditional pieces and non-vocaloid stuff). for once, i used my bigger sketchbook to make a big n detailed piece for my boy's new brave alt in feh (that game has zero significance to me outside of cool alt costumes for my faves). my actual fave from this month was young miku/meiko/kaito chillin in their house; i'm real proud of the background and lighting! but i still like this robin too ofc, big fan of how the colors came out ;3

Sep: another traditional drawing! felt compelled to draw kandy again, specifically her evil miitopia great sage incarnation :> this one was pretty standard in terms of process, and not much was really done to experiment. just wanted to draw something cool of my girl for my sketchbook. other fave from this month is this sketchy miku i did, i like how loose it came out and how the colors pop.

Oct: pretty palutena!~ i think i went into this trying to do something a little different with my painting process (i think it was to try incorporating more colors in the shading like the blue in the dress or more saturated colors near the focal point, but i can't remember LOL) or try rendering a more detailed character w/ a background (even if the background was pretty vague). i like this one! especially the color cohesion, it's pretty swag imo. other faves from this month was fanart i made for the song "orbit" since i also like how the color cohesion came out for this one, and the maid dress/crossover drawing i made for cringetober. no other words needed to explain why.

Nov: another digital painting! it's yet another ghost song, this time "uncanny". i really loved the aesthetic of this song, especially its bold colors and simplistic shapes, so i wanted to try capturing it in my style. i really love how the colors turned out on this, though i've yet to truly recreate what i like about this particular painting again? regardless, it's one of my faves, deserving of one of my favorite ghost songs. few other highlights from this month would be my obligatory purple robin drawing for the month, my sketchbook drawing of my luka design, and my fanart of utsu-p's song "ga". i like how i was able to do a couple of my different "styles"/processes this month rather than just sticking to just one. they all have their own feel to them that i like to play around with depending on the idea.

Dec: and finally, we're at the end. like july, we have another heavily improvised oc drawing with symbolism i came up with on the spot. that's just how i do things. anyway, this turned out really good in my opinion! i tried to stick to a color palette i saved in procreate a long time ago, and damn is it a fine palette. it helped me get a little loose with the colors and solely focus on creating a strong composition with colors and contrast rather than get hung up on sticking to typical color palettes. i also really like how i did the background by essentially using the liquify tool to swish all the colors around and then polished it a little on top. made for a really cool effect. other notable work would be the companion piece i made with my other oc that had a similar style since i liked the process of this one. there will probably be more as of when i'm drafting this (at the beginning of december) but i just wanna be finished w this post already bro

all around, very satisfied with this year. there was kind of a lot of song fanarts (something that i am somewhat guilty about because it feels like i'm unoriginal or something, but i swear it's cuz i'm really passionate about vocaloid music and need to act on what my braincells do when i listen to certain tracks), but overall i'm happy i was able to maintain some slight variety in the art i made this year through my chosen mediums and "styles" or processes i use.

this was the first year where i really wanted to have a fully rendered piece i'm proud of to represent every month. now, i wouldn't recommend this since forcing yourself to make art is not a good mindset to be in (sometimes, with how early i pushed some pieces out in certain months to get the monthly quota over with makes it seem like i'm getting paid to have a pretty year-in-review LOL). i was pretty lucky to not really have much burnout i guess?

~~~

ok now that all that boring stuff is out of the way, here’s my previous years! this is the sixth year i have made an art review chart.

lightning round review time! (probably just gonna be more boring stuff)

2018: ok, so this was the year where my prime art hosting platform was… amino… specifically smash amino. as much as i could rant about how much i hate that place now, i cant deny that it got me creating a lot of stuff. also it was an actual date archive for my traditional art because i never got in the habit of dating my physical art 🙃 uh don’t mind the absolute horrid graphic design on this one. i grabbed a template which was probably saved from a bunch of other places from amino and… didn’t really know how the formatting was supposed to work. first of all, i edited this in picsart on my phone and the chart wasn’t transparent, and second of all i didn’t know you were supposed to crop only the main focus so it could fit and be a little more clear. hence why its such a visual eyesore. i've been meaning to remake it to make it a little less bad (once i get my hands on the traditional pieces again), but i guess its shoddiness adds to its charm, much like amino. but anyway, 2018 was a bit of a turning point year for me in the smash amino art biz. on amino, i mostly made copies of official artwork from smash (character renders and so forth), and this year i actually tried experimenting with my own original ideas and scenes (my copying roots were still around at this time tho, seen in the november drawing which is based on ssbu’s mural art. i mainly moved on to copying artwork from feh). this was also the year i got my ipad and finally got into making digital art. i didn’t have the knowledge of digital art that i have today obviously, so colors and lighting were usually on the plain side. i also hit my stride with making more ambitious traditional art that incorporated backgrounds and such, and they’re pieces i’m still really proud of!

2019: so, i actually made this chart some time in 2021 or 22 because i didnt make an actual chart in 2019 officially (i forgor). which bums me out because i deleted my amino account by then, so a lot of dates for traditional pieces were flushed down the toilet the one time i needed them. so, to compensate, i tried scraping any digital piece i could to fill in some spaces, which is why some are more underwhelming than others. but yeah since this isn’t fully accurate to my art progress that year, 2019 is a bit fuzzy. main thing of note that year is midway through i got really REEAALLY into fire emblem: three houses and drew a lot of art of the characters (not shown much on the chart because they were mostly sketches and whatnot). imo there’s not much improvement or stylistic changes from 2018 in this year to note. 2020 on the other hand…

2020: if it wasn’t clear, this was my jojo phase. i got into jojo at the end of 2019 and my downward spiral into jojo hell bled into 2020 :p as such, i made a lot of jojo art. and because i made a lot of jojo art, this was the year where my style shifted drastically. i feel like it’s a common phenomenon for artists getting a total stylistic makeover after getting into jojo. whether it’s to imitate araki’s style or just trying to accommodate the characters’… features, i ended up facing the same thing. gone were big round heads with tiny mouths and in were tree trunk necks and higher effort placed in learning anatomy, both for the full body and well as the face. it was around may of this year i got procreate and moved on from ibis paint for digital art. while i still have my personal hangups with procreate, im glad i ended up investing in it since it really just works for me!!

2021: around summer 2020 in peak pandemic mood, i decided to indulge in some nostalgia and listened to some old vocaloid tunes from my middle school days. and then i kept rediscovering more stuff, and then i ended up browsing producers' individual discographies, and uh yeah i am still suffering the consequences of my vocaloid renaissance to this day. while it wasn't prominent in the 2020 chart, it really started to leak its way into my art subjects in 2021. however, i still primarily stuck to my roots with fe/"smash"/jojo fanart. this year was mainly trying to find my style again i suppose? i had already learned the ropes of procreate, its limitations, and the options it has to aid with the art making process, so it was just a matter of flinging a bunch attempts at a ~style~ to see which one i liked the most. i did try finding a painting/rendering style a lot by way of copying (mainly guessing based on speedpaints) other artists' styles and process with digital painting which ended up growing into my own thing. i know they all sort of look the same, but march, april, and october of this year all had slightly different ways of doing all the shading n rendering for painting that i liked experimenting w/ in the future.

2022: by this point, i had fully gotten used to procreate and the methods i used to make art, and the vocaloid train had no signs of stopping. i think the main thing of note this year was that i was able to break out of the "5 million overlays of pink and purple color vomit" box my digital art was set it. while it used to amuse me when i first began abusing it in my art, i guess i just sort of grew out of it? it ended up making a lot of my art look homogeneous, and it took out the fun trial and error of picking the colors to match the atmosphere myself. i also tried to get more experimental with my compositions, mainly in trying to make them more dense with Stuff as well as finally get a little more comfortable with drawing backgrounds. besides those things however, i remember feeling my art progress was very stagnant this year, with not much noticeable change from january to december. perhaps i've gotten a bit comfortable with the state it's in. regardless, still a good year all around.

~~~

whew. THAT'S finally done with. if you made it to the end of this very me-centered ramble, congrats. i will probably make reblog additions in future years to continue this little saga. idk if i'll be as detailed as i was for the 2023 lineup, but we'll see.

#not art #year in review #year in review 2023 #art review #fanart #mayors ocs #traditional art #digital art #long post #art #artists on instagram

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bittermause · 1 year

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End of the Year Review: A Three Year Act Edition

My birthday is ten days away, so I felt it appropriate to write another one of these End of Year Reviews before then. I decided to summarize the last two years since I didn't bother to do so after 2019. The motivation to do this came from regretting to not record and keep any of my previous EoY posts from 2018 and earlier. As I get older, those said years became a blur to me, which is unfortunate. But I digress, let's start things off with the glorious year of...

2020

The year when Covid went into full swing around the globe, but also the year of brand new beginnings and a year full of insane luck and precise timing. In 2019, literally the day after Christmas, I was offered a job as a 2D Animator for a unique Cybersecurity training firm in CA. After a brief moment of panic and my best friend convincing me to take a chance with this new venture, I agreed to move out west at the end of January, and start my new job in February. For first two weeks I stayed at an AirBnB close to my job, and eventually moved into a makeshift studio space attached to a family home that belonged to a fellow alumni's mother. I never imagined I would finally leave Michigan after 35 years of personal pain and misery, to have a job that actually paid a livable wage that was also synonymous with my career path, and be able to leave behind an environment that put me in a constant state of stress and depression. For the first time in ages, I felt truly blessed. In the Spring, my best friend and I started getting re-acquainted with an old mutual friend of ours that we seldom spoke to in years. We ended up spending weekend nights having three way calls, discussing creative projects and talking about life in general. Never thought I'd re-connect with them in such a way, but now we have a much tighter friendship bond than we did in the past.

2021

After being able to save a lump sum of money thanks to the low rent cost and full on public transit reliance, I finally acquired a car. It didn't take me long to get re-acquainted with driving on the road; not having to deal with the iconic pot holes and rough weather worn terrain made travel cakewalk. I took my time to discover some great local haunts, like GraphAids and Record Outlet. However, in October I realized that my body was out of shape, and when I weighed myself for the first time in forever, I was hitting 231 Lbs. I took it upon myself to start a weight and task log in order to keep track of CICO, and exercise again. ( I was rotating between DDPY, Ringfit and the mini-elliptical) I also acquired a nutritionist to guide me in making better decisions for my diet. When November rolled around, I came to the conclusion that I needed to move out of the little studio space and into my own apartment. While it helped me save a great deal of money, the space was tiny, I missed having a stove, and a washer and dryer nearby. My landlady was oddly avoidant on giving rent history to my soon-to-be apartment management, but come later December I was still able to get approval for a unit. That same month, I announced the end of my long running web comic The Shufflers. It was one of the hardest decisions I had to make, but a necessary one. I still think about whether or not I can pick it back up again, but only time can tell.

2022

No doubt, is perhaps one of my favorite years living out in CA by far. I moved into an upper level apartment, got promoted to Production Supervisor at my workplace, I traveled to Colorado Springs to hang out with my friend, got to visit The Academy Museum with my workmates and explored the Studio Ghibli exhibition, and roamed a little bit around my new city and found some neat shops and restaurants. Along with it's pleasures, also came with great internal struggles; even though I left my old life two years ago, some of the excess baggage was still clinging on to me, and my perception of self was still very unhealthy. I started receiving therapy in June twice a month, in order to help me untangle my past grievances with myself and to help me pull away from the people that caused it. These sessions have been a real eye opener, and keeping a journal based on each one has greatly helped. One of the hardest challenges I've ever faced so far was convincing myself that I am worthy of self love and respect, to undo the belief that I am an unlovable, creep-ass overweight toad, and stop hiding my honest feelings and insecurity behind a goofy ass mask. While it's been a painful journey, the self-discovery was worth it.

Plans for 2023

I'll be continuing my self-improvement goals throughout this year. Since last October, I went down to 202 LBS. Next year I'd like to hit 175 or less. (Ideally I should be aiming for 135 as the ultimate end goal, but that won't be likely for another year and a half). Outside of that, the other goals I'd like to achieve are;

Continue making Animated shorts.

Get contacts, particularly ones I can wear if I decide to go swimming.

Get my hair professionally colored. Been thinking of doing a red violet or dark purple.

Re-work my wardrobe more

Continue exploring and go to more events.

Work on an actual comic project again.

So far for all the goals I've set in previous years, I was able to attain them. I hope that I'll be able to continue that trend in the next year.

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cinemacentral666 · 9 months

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Iron Sky (2012) & Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019)

Movies #1,108 & 1,109 • TWO FOR TUESDAYS

"August Sky" month continues here on TWO FOR TUESDAYS.

[[[ NOTE: add link to this in GERMAN CHAINSAW review when you post it to other site ]]]]

These movies are A LOT. But that is by design. You don't put Hitler riding a T-Rex on the moon by accident. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

These two B-movie-ass-looking are somehow Finland's most expensive films ever made, which somehow just adds to the hilarity of the whole endeavor. I definitely liked the original one more so let's start there.

It's all the way in the distant future (2018) and the Nazis, having secretly escaped earth at the end of WWII, have set up shop on the darkside of the moon. A Sarah Palin-like American President is vying for reelection and so she sends an African-American model on a "BLACK to the MOON" promotional gimmick. There is satire and then there is this: something so goofy and overt that it nearly renders any/all commentary moot. But I did find the humor in this amusing to a degree. This was a nice Dr. Strangelove homage? Sure...

I mean, it's a little different because it features a Black man who has been cosmetically turned white against his will and now looks like nearly identical to that Wayan Brothers movie...

The plotline surrounding the idea that the Moon Nazis' discovery of this guy's iPhone and its computing power allowing them to complete their ultimate War Machine weapon is legitimately good satire. (Although the subsequent continuation of this thread in The Coming Race is one of that movie's worst ideas, and it's a real race to the bottom there.)

Look, I hesitate to say too much about either of these. I feel like just knowing the baseline plot is enough for anyone to decide whether or not they want to take the plunge into the Iron Sky Universe (apparently a third installment — featuring Andy Garcia (?!) — is coming out soon?) or not. Who knows. Look, I could appreciate both the humor (to a degree, not everything hits for sure), and the aesthetic (which is very bad! but bad in a way that I liked) but maybe I'm just a freak.

SCORE 6.5/10: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½

The crowdfunded direct sequel, Iron Sky: The Coming Race came out seven years later and despite featuring Udo Kier as Vril Adolph Hitler, it is easily the lesser effort. Also, somehow, despite being crowdfunded, it led to the bankruptcy of the Iron Sky Universe production company. I love the hubris that is attempting to turn this bonkers idea into a Marvel-like cinematic universe and I also love that it's completely imploded (but again: The Ark: An Iron Sky Story is apparently real so what is dead never truly dies?).

The main issue of this one is that is simply not funny at all. And that's a humongous problem when your movie is so clearly geared to function in that vein.

The legend Udo K. — reprising his role from the original in addition to playing the reptilian Hitler (this is loosely based on the Vril novel and ensuing conspiracy theories which is a whole 'nother can of worms) — has a ton more to do here which is one of the only things going for it. The only other real positive is that the action is ramped up to the nth degree, so you get stuff like Vril Osama bin Laden and Vril Pope Urban II riding wagon-pulling Triceratops off a cliff into a pit of lava and the aforementioned T-Rex/Hitler combo getting karate kicked to death by a blonde lady...

Even though they had a half decade to make this one, the writing is far more shoddy in every single way and there's no bigger example than the Tom Green subplot.

On the remnants of the partially destroyed Nazi Moonbase in 2049 (after nuclear war ruined the earth at the end of the first one — sorry, forgot to mention that detail), he leads a cult called the Jobsists formed around the teachings of Steve Jobs. It's like "remember the interesting stuff we did with Apple/iPhones in the original movie? Well here's some more 'satire' on that only it doesn't make any sense and isn't funny." It's a shame too because I was excited to see Green was in this. It just doesn't work at all.

Anyway, those are the two Iron Sky movies. The pride of Finland! I need to go take a shower.

SCORE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½

#4.5 #6.5 #2012 #2019 #🇫🇮#timo vuorensola director #comedy #sci-fi #lara rossi #vladimir burlakov #kit dale #julia dietze #stephanie paul #tom green #udo kier #christopher kirby #götz otto #peta sergeant

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sunny-sideup-4 · 9 months

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My review on Good Omens Season Two (also posted to Amazon Prime Video Reviews)

This season, this show in general, is beautifully written, directed, and executed. I can't perfectly describe how the story and characters just grab ahold of your attention instantaneously and keep you drawn in the entire time. There is never a dull moment. You become fully invested in the storyline and form a connection with the characters in a way that I, personally, haven't felt in YEARS. Despite the fictional nature of this story, the characters truly feel real and deal with very real internal and interpersonal conflict. This season was a reminder that we don't magically get fairytale endings-- we work for them. We make them ourselves through hard work and dedication. Through growth, change, and communication. I eagerly await the next season.

Now here's the special bit only for Tumblr: I have rewatched this show several times from beginning to end. I have watched it in it's entirety with my girlfriend and begun watching it with friends as well, with the intention of them becoming inspired in the same way I have. This season singlehandedly reignited a spark I had lost in 2020. In 2019, I was diagnosed with several chronic illnesses and began treatments for them in 2020, one week before the pandemic shut down the world. Learning I would forever live in a vessel that would always be sick... was soul crushing. Though things were starting to look up for my health through treatments that helped me manage my symptoms, I had lost the creative fire that roared at the very center of my being. It would come back in short little bursts of easily put out embers. I would write or draw or paint for a few days and then stop for months at a time, only to fall back into the never ending routine of going to work then coming home to lay on the couch in a deep depression that felt inescapable. I found other ways to be creative that were fulfilling- like crochet. I've deeply enjoyed the feel of yarn and hook moving in tandem to create a beautiful piece of fiber art to gift to others or keep for myself. I've enjoyed the peace it gives my over-active brain. There is no room for wild, unruly thoughts when my hands are constantly moving.

However, it never felt the same as it did when I was creating entire worlds in my head to escape into. It never brought the same sense of joy. It was fulfilling but not in the same way that set my soul ablaze. Good Omens Season two has opened a new chapter for me. It unlocked the prison cell that my creativity had been locked away in to rot. I am writing again. I am bringing ideas and stories to life. Plotting the the downfall and glorious uprising of characters once more. I feel alive again. I feel whole again. While I may keep my stories between myself and my close-knit chosen family, I finally have new stories to tell again. Thank you Neil Gaiman, @neil-gaiman. Thank you Michael Sheen and David Tennant. Thank you to the other actors and the crew that worked on this show and brought this story to the screens of the world. Thank you to Terry Pratchett, may he rest in peace, for his part in creating this story with Neil Gaiman. Thank you for telling a story that reaching into my chest and started my heart again. Thank you for telling a story that I could relate to. One that reflects parts of myself that few others can see. I don't think I will ever be able to say enough thank you's to convey how grateful I truly am.

To anyone who shares a story similar to mine- I see you. Keep fighting, keep growing, keep changing. Keep searching for hope in every crack and crevice of the world until you can even just the tiniest of slivers and let that help you to keep going until you can find yourself again. Until you can find your spark once more. I promise you that it's out there somewhere. Sometimes you will find in in unexpected places... like I found mine again, in Good Omens. Don't give up. Please. Please keep searching. Don't leave any stone unturned.

#good omens #good omens 2 #good omens season two #neil gaiman #david tennant #michael sheen #good omens fandom #hope #inspiration #story telling

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theredtours · 10 months

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Taylor Swift’s masterpiece Eras Tour sets Lumen Field attendance record

By Michael Rietmulder | Seattle Times music writer

Concert review

Taylor Swift was just getting warmed up. With a little help from a sold-out Saturday night crowd at Lumen Field that came ready to scream every line, Earth’s biggest pop star had just ripped through “Cruel Summer” — a 4-year-old electro-pop banger that’s arguably the song of this summer — when she decided to have a little fun.

Without saying a word, Swift pointed to sections of the Seattle crowd, which she pegged at 72,000, who would erupt like audible geysers on their queen’s command. “This could go to my head,” Swift said playfully. “You just made me feel so powerful, you know what I mean?”

It was a winking setup for a booming “The Man” — a joyful stomp-and-romp rebuke of sexist double standards — that saw Swift bro-ing around a gargantuan office-themed stage, fist-bumping her battalion of business-suited dancers in jest, as her sequined jacket and boots glistened in the fading sunlight.

After Saturday night, Swift has every right to feel powerful. Although Lumen Field reps couldn’t confirm the final attendance figures Sunday morning, it was the largest concert crowd in the venue’s history, breaking a record previously held by U2’s 360 Tour, which drew more than 70,000 fans in 2011. According to Swift’s team, 72,171 fans were in the house Saturday.

From the opening segment of Swift’s Eras Tour, for which there was an almost unprecedented amount of anticipation, Swift came ready to shoot-to-kill-you-with-a-look, as the stadium exploded with the strike of every pose or lick of her bright red lips. The three-and-a-half-hour marathon was barely underway, and it was already clear fans were in store for a night of entertainment on the biggest, grandest scale.

At 33, Swift already has around 15 years of pop stardom under her belt. In that time, she’s developed a reputation for having one of the strongest work ethics and most meticulous eyes for detail in the biz, and her ambitious, career-spanning Eras Tour takes that to another level. It’s customary for artists with catalogs as deep as hers to draw from the different periods of their careers with any tour. But the breadth and depth of the ground Swift covered across her whopping, 40-some-song set — without a proper set break, no less — was truly impressive, both physically and artistically. (Of her 10 albums, only her 2006 debut was omitted.)

Rather than working through material chronologically, Swift and her band — who flanked the back line of the stage, which had a long catwalk jutting out to the middle of the stadium and a secondary, diamond-shaped stage in the middle — ping-ponged between older and newer stretches of her career, helping the pace of the show.

Breaking out the set into nine or so album-specific segments, each with their own imaginative stage designs and wardrobe changes, only magnified the multitudes of Swift, the country-singer-turned-certified-pop-juggernaut who prompts economic impact studies in every metropolis she visits. Shuffling through the various periods of her career often felt like visitations from the ghosts of Taylors past, from the teenager singing of high-school romance (“Fearless” and “Speak Now”) to the crossover pop star starting to realize her widescreen visions (“Red” and “1989”) and the snake-slaying superstar whose life played out in the tabloids (“Reputation”).

The starkest, most potent juxtaposition came during the first half of the show, when Swift segued from the indie-folk underpinnings of “Folklore” to “Reputation,” with the buzzing synths and crunching trap drums of “Ready For It” making it clear we were out of the woods.

With a wealth of newer songs from a prolific four-album run she’d never before toured on (spanning 2019’s “Lover” to last fall’s “Midnights” LP), the star’s abbreviated throwback dives into her transitional “Speak Now” and “Fearless” eras felt particularly fan service-y.

It’s hard to fathom Swift getting more popular than she already was during her last Seattle date, when she brought her popcorn-ready Reputation Tour here in 2018. But kicking off a two-nighter at the same venue five years later, it seemed that for every millennial going “back to high school” with Swift on a gleeful pass through “You Belong With Me,” there was a 7-year-old singing along just as loudly to “Love Story,” the same 2008 seeds bearing yet another generation of Swifties.

One of Swift’s strengths as a performer is turning some of her less overtly stadium-ready songs into some of the biggest moments in her shows.

Sitting alone at a moss-covered piano, in keeping with the woodsy motif of her “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums, Swift eased in to a heart-leveling “Champagne Problems.” For a minute, there was a rare stillness in the air that the crowd seemed to breathe in, only to let loose in a triumphant choir, joining their leader loudest at the bridge. As the stadium erupted in an extended “Taylor” chant when the final note slipped away, even Swift seemed to well up a little on the big screen.

With each section of the show, the stage transformed into distinct mini universes, and for all the more explosive, fire-cannon-blasting moments, those woodsy “Folklore” and “Evermore” portions felt especially Northwest. When Swift later returned atop the mossy-roofed “’Folklore’ cabin,” she joked that the pandemic-conceived “fantasy world” was “in the middle of the woods — somewhere in Washington state, probably.”

Save for a pair of surprise acoustic songs (Saturday night it was “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” and “Everything Has Changed”), there isn’t a ton of variation in the set list from night to night on the Eras Tour. But with sibling rock trio HAIM joining the tour as one of the openers in Seattle, fans were treated to the debut of the country-rock-tinged “No Body, No Crime” with Swift accompanied by her three “besties” to kick off the “Evermore” portion of the night. Even though her country roots seem a lifetime away, the dark, brooding number is proof Swift can channel an outlaw spirit anytime she wants.

Having executed the most ambitious tour of her career as well as she did Saturday night, it’s fair to wonder if there’s anything left Swift can’t do.

#copied this so I can read it later in case the link dies #my show #ts #eras tour #article

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linklethehistorian · 11 months

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Total Eclipse (1995) — A Movie Review by linklethehistorian (Post 1/4)

Preamble

Oh boy. Where do I even begin with this one?

This movie had so, so much potential, and yet they just —

Ugh, we’ll save that for later, though. I guess I should start out by saying how I even came across this movie, and, more importantly, why I want to review it so badly, when there are already plenty of other regular people and a fair handful of so-called cinema-specific critics out there who already dedicated their time to doing that exact thing long before me.

The short answer is: dude, take just a brief glance through the posts on my blog. I’m an extreme Arthur Rimbaud fan and aficionado; how could this turn of events be even remotely surprising nowadays?

And as for the long answer, well…you see, it all started with a little manga/light novel/anime series called Bungou Stray Dogs. If you don’t know what that’s about, the simple answer is that it’s a series which revolves around the concept of, “What if many of the famous authors of the world lived in the modern era and had supernatural powers named after their most famous works?” It was thanks to a particular novel in this series called Dazai, Chuuya, Fifteen Years Old (or Fifteen, for short) that I was introduced to and fell in love with that series’ version of Arthur Rimbaud, and when the anime adaptation utterly butchered that beloved story and most of all his incredible character, knowing that the author of this series tended to base his characters very heavily upon their in-real-life counterparts (and having already had a very vague knowledge of the poet on whom my favorite character was based), I set out to learn much, much more about said historical figure.

From there, I dare say my fate was pretty sealed; running into mention of this movie about Rimbaud was more than a little inevitable in my beginning surface level endeavors, and in the grand year of early 2019, the great YouTube gods were still…‘favorable’ enough towards mankind to make finding such less popular films fully intact on the platform a fairly common occurrence, for better or worse.

On that note, I suppose I ought to be quite grateful that, although I therefore got the chance to watch the movie more than five times over the course of several months, it did get permanently taken down from YouTube shortly thereafter, thus preventing me from ever having the chance to do back then exactly what I am doing now — as, if I had been able at such a time, I know I would have greatly regretted the poorly educated thoughts I would’ve expressed, in the long run.

You see, although I don’t want to get too much into the greater details this prematurely, I will just say as a general note that I have this very movie to thank for more misconceptions about Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine — both big and small — than I could attribute to anything else I have ever stumbled upon in these past four years of putting my all into researching them; I can only express continuous gratitude towards myself for the fact that I didn’t simply turn back in my endeavor then and there and call it a day, having been wrongly satisfied with this movie’s frankly horrid inability to present the truth and thus carrying its misinformation and mis-presentation with me for the rest of my life.

Ah, but I digress, you’ve heard more than enough of my generalized rambling and mini-ranting for the moment; let’s dive right into what all you readers have truly been waiting for — the main review.

From this point forward, I will be dividing my thoughts into three separate sections: the Good (in which I will discuss those elements that I greatly enjoyed), the Bad (in which I will discuss the elements that I did not enjoy), and the Takeaway (in which I will give my thoughts on the overall experience and the somewhat broader implications which it has) — each of which will have its subjects divided up by specific categories therein; this should make it easier to discuss all of its merits and downfalls in a more orderly fashion.

Since this post is likely too large for Tumblr to be done all at once, each major section will be made into a separate post, which I will link below.

[Click here for Part 1: The Good]

[Click here for Part 2: The Bad]

[Click here for Part 3: The Takeaway]

#linklethehistorian #thoughts #my thoughts #meta #movie review #Total Eclipse 1995 movie review #total eclipse 1995 #arthur rimbaud #paul verlaine #leonardo dicaprio #david thewlis

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seasurfacefullofclouds1 · 2 years

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Mae Mae here. I have come to your blog with my Goddaughter for years, and went through the ah is the fave now he is scum! I agree that looking back the signs were there but I believe Louis was the one positive thing in his life that kept H grounded. His mom and sister were just visitors in his life bc he left home at 16 and easily influenced. He is a product of Azoffs and they saw $ in him. Hungry for not just fame but acceptance. With Louis around he had someone who truly put him first but 1/2

2/2 once H was away from Louis he became this robot. Dead eyes, can turn on his stage H at a snap, go off to himself and live his life. Not sure if he even sees the articles or knows the damage he has caused, or how many people dislike his blank canvas personality bc his people laugh at him and adore him to his face. He could have been better but went the cheap route. These movie reviews almost make me sad for him bc it’s a long way down for him. Louis is slow and steady and EARNING respect.

I think of Harry’s movie reviews as almost inconsequential, actually. His fans aren’t going to see an actor— they’re seeing “Harry Styles.” The way that his fans collude the plot of My Policeman with their idea of Harry’s inner psychology is as if the movie is depicting some sort of fic documentary, of Harry-the-genius-victim.

Harry’s own actual documentaries also show the same over-the-top hagiography, a wishful fulfillment of an unearned legendary status. The rumor that he was up for the Elvis role showed the same coy equivalence: Harry as the Elvis of his generation.

But actually, none of this matters. The Larries who love Harry the least STILL LOVE HARRY, whereas the Larrie who loves Louis least can barely stand him. Larries who favor Louis will still go see Harry’s movies. They’ll still buy his vinyls. They’ll get his merch. They buy his nail polish and the perfumes he pushes. They will participate in dynamic pricing. They will go to the Azoff stadiums. They’ll read the fics and they’ll stay friends with fans who have dropped Louis. They can see the most obvious evidence in front of their faces, and they’ll say it’s not evidence, it’s a mirage.

It’s been six years, long enough for anyone sane to look at the facts. Harries choose Harry because they side with Harry as he currently is, his values, his actions. Larries who are “Louie leaning” have also sided with Harry.

As for Anne and Gemma, it’s pretty clear that they prefer the Harry Styles who is rich and famous, the way he is now.

Actually, as of 2019, it was already apparent that Louis started putting the early parts of his memories away so that he could move past them. Even following Zayn and Harry for 1D anniversary was a closure of sorts. This is born out in his statement that he wanted Faith in the Future to be a “happy album”— he’s ready to move on.

[It also implies that Walls was full of heartache and unhappiness, but that’s evident to anyone who has a heart and a brain.]

#louis tomlinson #harry styles #Larries

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kura-reviews · 1 year

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Mountain Dew Pitch Black review

Those of you who know me, know that this one has a lot of weight to it.

Originally a Halloween limited edition flavor in the early 2000s, I was lucky enough to try it in its original run. I loved it instantly, and I always wanted to see it and taste it again. Over the years there were a few limited time re-releases and I bought as much of it as I could when it was available, but it always left store shelves again and again, and I lamented the time we had apart.

2016's DEWcision campaign put the venerable Baja Blast against Pitch Black to a vote for which would become a permanent offering. My love for Baja Blast was only topped by Pitch Black, and I voted accordingly. I felt lucky that my vote ended up for the winner, but it was not to be - my area rarely stocked Pitch Black even then, and according to the Mountain Dew fandom wiki, it disappeared entirely from store shelves yet again in 2019.

My hopes remained that I would once again be reunited with my beloved. When I heard the news last fall that a new can design was leaked, I was beyond excited, especially when the rumors turned out to be true. Another limited run of my favorite pop (or soda, for those of you who call it that)! Even with a brand new zero sugar variant, as is my preference. I could not believe how lucky I felt. It was to be a limited time product starting in January 2023.

Yet still, it remained hard to find in my area. A few stores carried a single row of 12-pack cans of the original flavor, but Zero Sugar was nowhere to be found. I managed to find some of the regular at a grocery store, and then again two final cases buried in a display at a convenience store. As I write this review, I am sipping the final can I could find.

Now, the review, with just a bit more waffling because I truly can't resist.

It has been a number of years since I was able to crack open a cold Pitch Black. And though the familiar Pitch Black flavor is very much present, my time away from drinking high fructose corn syrup-flavored drinks has given me a new sensitivity to the HFCS flavor, which cuts through the delicious grape and lingers in the mouth. This was disappointing to realize and hampered my enjoyment, especially given that I was only ever able to try the ZS variant once. Grape soda fans would enjoy it, but it still carries the signature Dew citrus undertone. The grape flavor is somewhat different than that which is found in candy or run-of-the-mill grape sodas, so even those who aren't big fans should try it if they can. Not guzzleable in my opinion. I never once discovered Pitch Black Zero Sugar in the wild, but my girlfriend saved me a single can from her travels. It was incredible. Everything I loved about the original but without the sugar. Such a smooth taste and feel in the mouth, without the HFCS aftertaste.

Regular is a 8/10. My memory had it rated at 10/10, but tastes change over time.

Zero Sugar, 10/10.

As of the time of writing this (mid-April 2023), this flavor is starting to disappear in stores. If you can still find it, it's worth checking out. But as time goes on, we'll just have to wait for another round of this special drink.

#beverage #soda

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skzingitup · 1 year

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ALBUM REVIEW TIME 👹

This is gonna be a long one so be prepared!!

Today we will be reviewing Stray Kids’ new compilation album SKZ-REPLAY. comprised of songs previously released on youtube. They decided to bring them to streaming platforms, along with new solo songs for each member.

I wasn’t going to do this review because its a big album. But i’m bored and sad and SKZ make me feel better so here we go!!

FAM (Korean ver.) - 5/10 - I’ve listened to the japanese version a few times before. It’s cute. A little song to introduce all the Skz members!! Funky little beat. Not something i would listen to often tho. But a great way to start this album

Connected (BangChan) - 5/10 - All English!! Someone get this man laid he keeps writing horny song 🤨 2016 love island intro type beat. Kind if slays tho tbf. I really like Chan’s vocal tone. Although i prefer his other solo on this album.

Limbo (Lee Know) - 9/10 - Pop Rock ballad from Lee Know. Makes me so happy i get to hear his vocals so much more 😭 everything about this song suits my music taste. No complaints. Just *his voice* man has lungs fr. The way it just ends abruptly is genius. They will forever be stuck in this limbo with no solution or end. PERFECTION. I sobbed when i first listened

Doodle (Changbin) - 7/10 - well and truly noise music. Pots pans and alarms if you will. And for some reason it tickled my brain so well. MY LIFES LIKE A DOODLE MY STYLES LIKE A DOODLE!! I’m in love with the way he says doodle in this!! Changbin said with this song he wanted to make a song with a unique flow and style. And i think he succeeded!! But however because if it’s jarring nature, it loses it’s repeatability

Love Untold (Hyunjin) - 7/10 - now the articles lied to me about this song. It said it was hip hop with rock guitars. There was a single rock guitar chord before the final chorus and they it cut off 🧍🏼‍♀️ left me disappointed so my initial impression of the song wasn’t that good. BUT after listening again for what it actually is. An alternative hip hop song. It’s amazing!! Hyunjin’s lyricism is so pretty and he makes good tracks!! His vocal/rapping tone works so well with this style of song. However. I do prefer his other solos on this album. That YAEEYAEEYAEEYAEYA get stuck in my head fr.

RUN (Han) - 8/10 - I love the music Han makes so much. He always writes such relatable lyrics and this one hit. And the funky little sophisticated mario cart beat is so good!! I like that the beat feels like its running. It matches the name of the song!! I thought he sounded different in this song and it turns out he used the original recording from 2019 for this so it makes sense. He sounds younger. Writing and recording at a time where he struggled really come across in his voice and it’s really smart of him to keep the original track!! So much replay ability with this one. Its just so addictive!!

Deep End (Felix) - 6/10 - Now when felix said he was gonna do a song that had no rap i was surprised but then he said it was gonna be a song like glimpse of us but mixed a bit with lalaland. And he wasn’t wrong. He said said it would have an ASMR type feel to it. To which he was correct in saying. Now Felix isn’t rhe strongest vocalist in skz. But his development over the last year alone is so good and his confidence has grown in his voice and i’m so proud of him. With this song he managed to show off his fucking 3 octave vocal range. Insane. Imagine what he could do in a couple more years!! The way he harmonises woth himself is so fucking good. Anyway. The song is in all english and i cried 😭 its too sad to be repeatable but it’s so good!!

Stars and Raindrops (Seungmin) - 8.5/10 - seungmin working with Day6’s producer is always gonna create a banger. A retro/nostalgic sounding pop rock style song. Reminds me of Fairytale by Dreamcatcher. Perfect song to listen to on full blast while driving at nighttime!! Also Seungmin’s vocals!! The money i would pay to have this man just sing right next to my ear. 😩 so much replay ability here too!! Beautiful song!!

Hug me (I.N) - 8/10 - quick stop at the beach i suppose 😭 this is such a tropical funky little song. Ukulele song for sure!! Get them 2016 ukulele girlies on this one!! Jeongin’s vocal improvement over the last year makes me emotional. His voice is so unique and lovely and i’m so happy he gets to use his full capabilities now. Someone on twt pointed out you can hear when he’s smiling when he sings and they’re so right. And thats throughout this whole song. Gonna sob Also the sentiment of him wanting to hug us (the fans) in this song as someone who doesn’t like physical touch that much means so much 😭🥹 ILL GIVE YOU A HUG OH BABY!! basically i am in love with him, hand in marriage sir!!

#loveSTAY - 6/10 - I’ve not actually listened to this one before, lets go 👹 ballad!! Dedicated to the fans (STAYS) stunning vocals!! Skz don’t have very show offy vocalists but all their tones are so fucking nice to listen to and that’s so much better to me that being able to hit lots of high notes. It’s cute!! Ballads automatically don’t have much replay ability factor for me because i have to be in a specific mood for them but this is such a lovely song. Lovely is the perfect description i feel

Zone (3RACHA) - 7/10 - honestly, my fave 3racha track i’ve heard so far. (I haven’t dabbled in their pre-debut stuff yet, im too scared 😭) it’s a very classic rap song. The chorus is addicting. CANT YOU SEE IM IN MY ZONE!! The use of native māori words is cool too!! Māori fans have praised the pronunciation and correct use of them so that’s really nice to see!! Changbin’s gritty rap tone is so good man 😩 honestly a slay

Close (Han) - 5.5/10 - Pretty!! I am just in love with the instrumentals he produces, they’re so pretty and chill (most of the time) his rapping style is my fave in the group. Good pitch and flow and stuff. Very pleasing to listen to. And he has such insane vocals too. What can’t this man do actually?? 🤨 the stylistic autotune in the chorus makes it less replay-able personally. I’m not a huge fan of it when it’s on quite high pitched vocals. Just doesn’t sit well in my ears. But aside from that. A very lovely song

Streetlight (Changbin ft. Bangchan) - 9/10 - Oh how i love this song. The meaning behind it 🥹 Changbin wrote it in hopes to be the “streetlight” for fans who are facing a period of darkness and released it during mental health awareness month!! I love him ☹️ but aside from that, i will always love a song that has vocalist changbin in it!! Also it’s nice to hear softer raps from him!! Chan’s feature blends in so nicely and just adds an extra layer of vocals to complete the song!!

I hate to admit (BangChan) - 10/10 - Fuck. I love this song so much. The simple piano instrumental with Chan’s emotional vocals!! Makes me cry every time. I’ve been listening to it on repeat since it came out!! the lyrics are simple but so effective. His voice is just so €~*_=|€]+[=!| in this yknow?? His softer lower tone with powerful chest voice when it picks up?? Stunning!! HOW COULD I FORGET! THE DAY YOU LIED TO ME!!!!

I GOT IT (Han) - 7/10 - youtube diss track type beat 😭 also the switch up from chan to this?? Insane. Who decided the song order for this album!! But anyway. The song. Very much classic rap style song. Get to see the capabilities of Han’s more agressive/ faster style of rapping in this!! Would I shake ass to this?? Absolutely. Again what cant he do? Songs that make me cry and songs that make me shake ass, sometimes even both at the same time?? Genius fr

Miss you (Hyunjin) - 10/10 - oh how i love this song, his soft and swingy style vocals in this make me ascend to heaven actually. The acoustic guitar!! I love a good acoustic guitar in a song!! Honestly not much to say about this other than it’s pure vibes. Gives me the same feeling that Fairy of shampoo by TXT did!!

Maknae on top (I.N feat BC + CB) - 7/10 - this song 💀 its so silly. So unserious. Jeongin went to chan one day and was like “so i want to make a song about how i’m the one in charge and have you and binnie act as my servants/body guards” and i respect him for that. Goofy ass autotune but it works in the unseriousness of the song. MAKNAE ON TOP OHWOAHOH!! Changbin and Chan’s features work so well and yeah overall silly goofy song passes the vibe check

Alien (Han) - 6/10 - I wonder if he regrets writing the chorus in such a high key 😭 but yeah back to the same sort of style as close, this time depicting how he feels like an alien on earth as he doesn’t quite fit in and struggles with who he is as a person. Which fits in with Han’s own struggles with people and social anxiety. Honestly a slay. Made me cry, related a little too much. Again the autotune takes away replay ability for me. But it works better in this song!!

Because (Changbin, Felix) - 6/10 - VOCALIST BINNIE AGAIN!! A chill beat!! Felix’s deeper vocals mix really well with Changbin’s lighter tone. But the rasp of felix’s voice and the grit in changbin’s compliment each other so well in the rap verses. And the soft chorus ties it all together

Piece of a puzzle (Changbin, Seungmin) - 6/10 - oh pretty start!! I will never get over how much i love seungmin’s voice!! DONT FADE AWAY DONT FADE AWAY!! More melody to changbin’s rapping in this too!! Not much to say with this one honestly. Just a chill and pretty song!!

Wish you back (Han) - 6/10 - ah yes, the song everyone low key agrees is written about hyunjin on his hiatus 😀 pain 😀 another song that falls into the same genre as close and alien. But a bit more up beat that those two!! He really does just know how to make a nice song!! I WISH YOU BACK!!! I WISH YOU BACK!! the auto tune is a bit much for me in the song as well. But yeah great song!!

HaPpY (Han) - 7/10 - at this point i think we all have a grasp of what a Han song sounds like. Rap with some nice vocal moments, stylistic autotune and a chill hip hop type beat!! I love that he already has a distinct style that he keeps improving upon as he goes!! The autotune works better in this one too!!

Up all night (BC, CB, FLX, SM) - 10/10 - best song ever. EVER. i love it so much. Funky little tune with some funky dudes. Got halloween vibes (especially the MV) but yeah. It was the first song Chan produced as a trainee but just remastered and featuring some of his members. This coming after maknae on top with a 5 second transition is so fucking good btw. Happened when i shuffled the other day! Has a kind of salsa type beat to it but mixed with that trap/hiphop beat. Works so well. I will never get tired of this song. Even tho its a more relaxed song it doesn’t get boring. I DONT WANT TO GO TO SLEEP NOW, ILL BE MAKING A MASTERPIECE NOW

Drive (Bangchan, Lee Know) - 6/10 - ah yes, the song that is absolutely about driving 😀 this is such an unserious song for me too, it’s so silly. The autotune fits with the unseriousness like maknae on top. But yeah. Just two dudes singing about riding rough in the course of the night. RIDE LIKE THE MOTION OF THE OCEAN!!

Ice.cream (Hyunjin) - 9/10 - words cannot describe how much this song just makes my brain happy. They lyrics are sad tho ☹️ its about seeing someone who has a cold exterior as someone who is actually warm. Hence “i see ice as a cream babe” but in actuality they are just cold 😀 he had to go and make the trope actually sad 😀 but yeah. Relaxing r&b style song. I love it so much

Anyways. Thank you if you made it all the way to the end!! Stan Stray kids and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!! 🫶🏻🎄

#emi reviews albums #kpop #stray kids #skz replay #skz

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