What makes it a bad post is that I accidentally said “after” when I really meant “before” and I didn’t realize my mistake until hours later [entry of the gladiators plays]

14 minutes to Through Deaf Eyes and Tokyo Magic Star episode 7. Grab your snacks and void your bladders!

~1 hour to Through Deaf Eyes and Tokyo Magic Star episode 7!

Back when I was still an anarchist I had a dream about commandeering a tank and using it to dispel a group of neo-Nazis. I relayed this dream to a liberal^[1] I knew, who called my behavior in the dream “tankie”. I thought but didn’t say, “What, so would you have preferred me to just do nothing and let those neo-Nazis go around chanting hate slogans and intimidating immigrants?”

That interaction was pretty formative for me, I think, because after that I pretty much stopped taking the word “tankie” seriously whenever I heard it; because if an anarchist in a dream, breaking the law and acting in an individual capacity to dispel full-on “blood and soil” neo-Nazis, could be called a “tankie” by someone who isn’t even a revolutionary leftist; then surely anyone can be called a tankie by anyone else for any reason. All that “tankie” really seems to mean is “leftist who Does Stuff” — because leaving a mark on the world means pushing your hand into the clay, applying force, one might even say — gasp! — imposing authority. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a” yadda yadda yadda. I also once heard someone else say “better to do no wrong than do something right” to describe the sort of thinking that leads people to call other people “tankies”: it’s a very Christian sort of mindset, you know, just one of a series of words for “leftist I don’t like”.

Now personally, I call leftists I don’t like “yahoos”, and the truth is that every single leftist on the planet is at least a little yahooish: you’re a yahoo if you support China too much; you’re also a yahoo if you support China too little; and I’m a yahoo for not knowing what the right amount of support for China is, even though I am not and will never be in any sort of position where my opinion on China will even remotely matter to the historical development of our planet; and my actual contribution to The Revolution™ will only ever be a very China-unrelated microscopic drop in the bucket.

As for how I abandoned anarchism, which some might say is when I “truly became a tankie”: it just made an intuitive sort of sense to me that history is a series of forces being metaphorically “persistence-hunted” by other forces. So learning about dialectics and historical materialism and whatnot didn’t really feel like abandoning anarchism so much as it felt like a new understanding of strategy, that anarchism / abolition of the state / communism as a historical force is not yet strong enough to win, but it can become strong enough if the currently stronger forces get to duke it out first and become tired enough for abolition of the state to persistence-hunt. Which means that my goal as an actor however small in the historical process should be to hasten that battle.

~7½ hours to the documentary film Through Deaf Eyes, followed by Tokyo Magic Star episode 7. Look forward to it!

@Grebgreb@hexbear.net pattern recognition

Thank you for your encyclopedic knowledge of Pretty Cure and very good knowledge of magical girls and anime girls in general. I did start reading the Esperanto translation of the Mermaid Melody: Pichi Pichi Pitch Aqua manga a while ago but I guess the character design didn’t leave a lasting impression. Full Moon O Sagashite is apparently on my PTW; I knew it was familiar but I couldn’t find it no matter what I searched, but I guess I should’ve just searched my PTW to begin with. Fine and Rein were two characters I was particularly curious about just because they stand out as having particularly cute designs in the fanart. And of course the qipao-wearing odango-head is called “Meirin” — that’s like a whole trope, isn’t it? That every Chinese girl in anime is called Meiling.

I can only assume that the ones I could identify were all ones you were already familiar with, too.

So, the following ten characters remain unidentified:

Broom riders: left two

Top row: center

Fourth row: left of center, right of center, fourth from right

Fifth row: far right, second from left, center

Bottom row: second from right

I feel like I should mention that this “Habibi Che” dream also involved:

1. Me learning about some sort of referendum in Gaza following the Battle of Gaza in 2007;^[1]
2. Some sort of ripoff of SCP-035 going around killing people in my local area;^[2]
3. A false awakening immediately followed by grotesque eye-related body horror;^[3]
4. Some really weird pregnancy fetish stuff right at the end.^[4]

So like……… Do you really want to spend a day in my brain? I mean, I won’t stop you, but you’re gonna see some shit, is all I’m saying.

14 11 minut do starta! (art by Dimfann)

P O U S E

1 hour to Equine Fecal Dowels Protruding From The Ground and Strigine Domiciles!

I’m gonna be honest with you, I thought it was your sister’s best friend who was the weirdo hippy with white girl dreads. In hindsight, the actual intended meaning makes more sense.

But yes, stage an intervention.

Just under 9 hours until we continue PONIES: The Anthology and The Owl House!

I really do think She-Ra is the best and most “on-brand” option.

Out of those, I’m most excited for She-Ra. I started that show yeeeeaaaars ago and never finished it, and it’s been so long that I have no idea where I left off, but I would like to come back to it. It definitely seems like your style.

I have seen all of the Ranma ½ reboot and I can attest that the whole thing rocks, and it has a great dub. I’m not sure if I’d join if you were to show it, though, since I already saw the whole thing so recently. But we’ll see. Likewise for Zombie Land Saga: I’ve seen parts of it, and it is awesome, but I was going to see the rest with somebody else, so I’m not sure if I’d join if you were to show it.

Punchline and Princess Jellyfish — I have no relationship to them, but I’ll take your word for it.

I had suggested Maison Ikkoku Apartment Fantasy (1986) and Nuummioq (2009) as movies that another blorper could show. I think it’s @Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net who’s currently planning on showing them, so if you’re interested in showing them yourself (or getting Lemgra to take over for you next Friday) you should sort it out with him. @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net and @Camden28@hexbear.net also often take over for people, so you can ask them. I’d also found a YouTube playlist of subtitled Tigrigna/Eritrean movies but that’s maybe a bit too far outside your niche.

In the long term, if you want to stick with anime, then some suggestions might be…

• Dirty Pair — 80s girls with guns sci-fi anime. An episodic ecchi comedy with I’m told one of the best trans representations in anime. Many people recommend this to fans of Panty & Stocking and vice versa. Very popular!
• Lycoris Recoil — 20s girls with guns anime that I’m told is VERY gay. Also very popular! But also the shortest of these four suggestions.
• D4DJ First Mix — 20s slice of life anime about girls DJing. Notoriously gay and also notable for being fully CGI. This is the one I’m personally most excited for out of these four suggestions.
• Stop!! Hibari-kun! — 80s comedy anime with a transfem protagonist. Often considered one of the best if not the absolute best trans representation in anime.

Whatever you decide on, you might want to confirm with the others that nobody else is already planning on showing that series.

LAST PANSTO

It has been a WHILE since I last thought of Chisato Moritaka! I’ve never heard this song before, but it is a banger, as expected.

I believe I was first introduced to Moritaka through the comments under this Taiwanese cover of “The Mi-Ha” — unfortunately, seems like the comments under that upload have since been disabled. Moritaka also made the opening theme to the anime adaptation of the English children’s novel The Twins at St. Claire’s; and It Is Said that Moritaka inspired the design of Sailor Mars.

I’m taking “new music” to mean “any music you haven’t heard before”, so I’ll mention these YouTube channels:

• Harakiri Diat uploads a lot of recently-released songs and albums in punk and punk-adjacent genres.
• Ultradiskopanorama uploads a lot of old and obscure disco, funk, synthpop and similar, particularly from the Eastern Bloc and Asia.
• Peđa Radović uploads a lot of old music from Yugoslavia.
• Music Ocean uploads retro albums, mostly from the USSR.
• Planet ASE (formerly “Are Sounds Electrik?”) uploads obscure electronica-type music and other curiosities, most of it old but some of it new.
• KEXP uploads a lot of live performances by music acts that are niche, maybe up-and-coming or maybe already popular in their country of origin.
• THE FIRST TAKE uploads a lot of live performances of J-pop and anison.

There’s also the ol’ reliable of just listening to the radio. Or rather, I use a program on my computer called Shortwave to listen to radio stations from around the world. My go-to is РадиоRadio КавказKavkaz ХитHit (https://kavkazhit.hostingradio.ru:8017/kavkazhit96.mp3), which Shortwave calls an “orphaned station”. I can still listen to it without issue but I guess “orphaned” means that if I were to delete Радио Кавказ Хит from my library then I won’t be able to add it back. Радио Кавказ Хит is based in Southern Russia (Northern Caucasus) and plays pretty much exclusively folk pop from that part of the world, in any case. The cool thing about Shortwave is that it records all the songs you hear, so you can easily download them.

I’m just saying, The Sopranos intro is 90 seconds long, and you know what else has a 90 second intro…