Overthinking the apocalypse

It's generally hard for a Japanese porn performer to be allowed to transition into mainstream TV, but there seems to be a bit of a tradition of AV actresses being cast as femme fatales in tokusatsu, of all things:

I still plan to write more on my series about early videogame lesbians, but today I want to highlight this enemy character from the Castlevania series who, like many early trans characters, started her existence as an unfunny bigoted joke, but then transcended the meanness by the sheer presence and glory of her gender. I'm talking about the Icy Chick, the Evil Ghost who Transitioned, the Snow Fairy herself: Frozen Half, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The description reads: “An evil New Half spirit who wields power over ice. A minion of Galamoth.”

It's finally happened. Enough time has passed, enough other scenes have come and gone in the meantime, that I can be legitimately nostalgic for vaporwave. Not like, ａｅｓｕｔｈｅｔｉｋｋｕ ironic nostalgic, but just baseline regular nostalgic for the (sunset) golden days of the nostalgia-est of nostalgia genres.

Todo ser aprenderá / a ter as estrelas como guia…

Though I'm sure somewhere out there there's young folk born too late to have caught anything to do with vaporwave, and who now feel nostalgia for the early vapor scene while having never been there. This thought makes me happy.

So even a girl such as you is interested in learning sukeban-shiki gyakute-no-bokutō, huh. I can show you, but it's gonna cost ya…

An all-female bōsōzoku gang posing in matching outfits for a “Teens Road” reportage, 1995.

Lately I've been looking into African rhythm (Western or generally Sub-Saharan). Because after understanding the basics of how melody and harmony works, I want to get a better feeling for rhythm.

Japanese flute music is very comfy for me because the rhythm is free and intuitive and nature-sound-like, but at some point I want to be able to do things like playing modern music at a nice pace or just accompanying wadaiko in festivals. and my problem with that is that I hate metronomes. Really fucking hate metronomes. Can't stand the damn things. (I wonder how European Common Practice musicians trained rhythm before the invention of metronomes.)

It's not the clacking that bothers me, it's the deadness of fitting into a grid. This schoolroom feeling of it, this dictatorshipness (but I repeat myself). Even though rhythm is fitting into a grid? But it feels so different when it's someone playing the drums. I considered using the library's Volca Bass, or borrowing their Stylophone Drums, to have something more interesting than a clack, but in the end a drum backing track on youtube is much better for me, though still I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not sure I can explain it well.

When I tried once to explain briefly to a friend what it was all about, I found that with the exercise of severe economy I took 41 pages and 10,000 words. (J.R.R. Tolkien) #relatabel #justlikeme #frfr

I think most people haven't browsed the History of Middle-Earth and thus don't know how much Tolkien struggled with executive dysfunction and how much of his work is unfinished. HoME is 12 volumes of unfinished, unedited, often contradictory material; it's not a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, a narrative of events in the realms of Arda, it's a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, I, Christopher Tolkien, will show the boxes and boxes of Middle-Earth manuscripts that my father started and never completed; it's a history of the work we call Middle-Earth, a history of revisions. And that's still not all of it! Most of the stuff that interests me was to be slowly published even later, in the periodicals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, and occasionally in books like The Nature of Middle-Earth (2021). It's still not all published, by the way. Christopher and the Tolkien Estate editors involved with this describe it more to the note of “scratched the surface” or “tip of the iceberg”. Yes, this is the most famous name in fantasy and most of his material remains unpublished.

Saw a video about it and it doesn't cite sources but it sounded like plausible advice, so I'm taking notes to try it later.

I don't really understand how to learn music. Or arts in general. Because I am a linguistics researcher I know how people learn languages (you don't really “learn” them), and I understand how people learn things like math or sociology, which is completely unlike language. But music is a bit like language and a bit like math. I'm having a lot of fun with musicology (the equivalent of linguistics, as opposed to language learning); but just like studying grammar is an entirely different skill and wholly unrelated to the process of becoming fluent in a language, or just like researching sports science is a different skillset and unrelated to becoming good at playing a sport, so also analysing the structure of music is an entirely different skill than actually being able to produce it. I understand how the former is done, but the latter? It baffles me.

Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: Toki Tatara's Oni-ren (“demon training”) drills carry the implication that if you survive these intense exercises from hell, your skill level will go up. But does either rationale necessarily follow?