The only two things I’m “loyal” to are the roughly 12 kilometer radius immediately surrounding my house, and the world in general. That is all: nothing more, nothing less. I only really care about the arbitrary lines on a world map that determine which holidays I get off work, to the extent that I’m circumstantially forced to by the practical needs of political organization in the face of millennia-old historical forces way beyond my control.

15 minutes to The Boondocks and fanime!

The Boondocks and fanime in 1 hour and 10 minutes!

If you look closely you’ll see there’s actually two handles, which means that rather than some weird amalgamated tool, the person is really just carrying a separate squeegee and a floor broom in the same hand. Probably a street sweeper or something along those lines. Other signs that this photo is probably real include:

1. The tile pattern on the street is remarkably consistent: all lines intersect at a single point.
2. The text is wholly ungarbled. You can make out a Calvin Klein logo, plus the text on the signs in cursive Hebrew: היפים והמיצים, which is remarkably consistent on both signs. That’s the logo of “Beautiful & Juices”, a real juice bar on 7 Sheinkin Street, occupied Jaffa. Finding other photos of the same location confirms that the exterior really looks like that.

That doesn’t rule out this photo being doctored in some way, and it certainly doesn’t mean that this photo wasn’t staged (it pretty obviously was), but the problem with AI images has thus far been far more that it makes us doubt or dismiss real photos than that it makes us believe in fake ones.

8 hours and 15 minutes until we finish season 1 of The Boondocks, followed by some fanime by the makers of My Demon Girlfriend and Tokyo Magic Star.

I CAN NAME AT LEAST ONE 27 YEAR OLD WHO I KNOW WOULD MAKE A GOOD LEADER OF HIS COUNTRY………

CAN I GET A “TAMAAM, SAYYIDI”?!

Making 35 year olds old enough to run for president while also being too young to vote for president would be a very good bit.

It’s the parable of the blind men and the elephant: “Should I be allowed to date someone much older than me?” and “Is there a problem of people pursuing much younger partners as a form of abuse?” can both be answered with yes; however if you’re only touching on the one question, some number of people could wrongly infer that the answer to the unadressed question is “no”.

I don’t think it’s really that different from, say, whether trans people should be allowed to date cis people. You can say yes to that, but that doesn’t mean you’re in favor of chasers abusing people, right? Ultimately, what’s important is that people have the knowledge they need to identify people’s motives, identify when they’re being exploited, build equitable relationships, and keep escapes ready if necessary; that they have friendships and other resources at their disposal so that they can’t be isolated; that sort of thing.

Absolutely, absolutely. Very important addition!

I’m honestly concerned that people will start thinking anyone below 40 is a child who doesn’t deserve rights!

It’s going to depend on the country, but for me it was probably the 2011 Norway attacks.

I don’t really have any context for what exactly the original post is about — I guess some A24 scandal I haven’t heard of? — but speaking about age in general, as someone around that mid-20s-ish range, I feel like there’s a simultaneous growing infantilization of adults and adultification of children as a result of late crapitalism. I like to call this phenomenon “age soup”, the way actual legal adults are so often priced or otherwise shut out of traditional markers of adulthood, at the same time as children are being forced away from child-safe spaces and deprived of typical child things to do, and end up in these surveillance capitalist social media hellscapes where they’re marketed to as if they’re adults, and exposed to pedos and neo-Nazi recruiters and all sorts of other things that they’re just too young for. Basically, the “simultaneous infantilization and adultification” is really just another way of saying that increasingly older people are being increasingly deprived of their independence, and increasingly younger people are being turned into increasingly exploited subjects of capitalist system.

Maybe I’ll see things differently a decade from now, but from where I stand, I feel like even many people here are far too willing to buy into this sort of infantilization of adults that’s being pushed by the ruling class. And I don’t even really know why people here have this tendency to infantilize people my age. I mean, it couldn’t be as simple as wanting to see themselves as somehow “above” younger adults, right? I don’t think that’s it, that doesn’t seem in character for most of the people here. And it couldn’t be as simple as going when people in their 20s or even 30s can’t get jobs, can’t afford a car or to move out or anything like that — people on this site are very much aware that things aren’t fine, that’s literally why we’re here. So what is the deal with all the infantilization I see? I mean, surely we all know that all people deserve independence, respect and dignity, that’s what we’re fighting for. Surely we all know that power dynamics are bound up in tons of different factors which can all be structurally accounted for with some effort.

Not shown in the GIF above is that it actually comes with handles that you can fold out for better ergonomics!

But yeah, something like those gamesir controllers, it does look a bit less awkward to hold, but that comes at the cost of being less pocketable.

There’s an add-on for smartphones called MCON by OhSnap, and it looks pretty darn yummy IMO: it really seems to have totally solved the issue of portability for smartphone game controller addons (such as the Gamesir x5 lite mentioned by lurkerlady), it seems to have good ergonomics to boot, but the problem… is that it’s fucking expensive. And also it only supports a limited number of games. As usual, el problema es el capitalismo: I really like the idea of modularity, that instead of buying more gizmos than we need, we just add or remove components to make one gizmo better suited for a specific task; but when both software and hardware are proprietary, you’re pretty much inevitably going to run into these issues of controllers being overpriced while also only having limited support.

This being said, I have a decent number of games on my phone without one of these fancy controller add-ons, and I’m broadly satisfied with them. I get my games from Fdroid, so they’re all FOSS.

Edit: And this isn’t necessarily to put down the “traditional” smartphone game controllers or excessively praise this one gizmo made by some corporation, there are other kinds of smartphone controllers and people will have different preferences.

What the fuck is a barakamon

is that like obama as a pokémon

perhaps in a Hideaki Anno gets credit for ideas in Evangelion that are actually from Tomino’s work way.

Oh? Do tell.

I picked up season 4 of Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-Kun!.

Fanime ass title

I watched a few episodes of Lycoris Recoil and vibes-wise it reminded me of older action comedies like City Hunter, Gunsmith Cats, etc.

It’s been on my PTW for ages, so it’s good to know I should measure my expectations. I did (mostly) enjoy Gunsmith Cats, except I wasn’t able to finish it because I really can’t stand “neck stuff”.

Well, since it was only 15 days between this thread and the last monthly anime thread, there haven’t been too many developments.

Reading

I’m still reading Yotsuba& and Moby Dick. No progress on anything else. I apparently forgot to mention that I downloaded Parenti’s To Kill A Nation last month, but I haven’t actually read much from it. I also downloaded audiobooks of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi to, like, fall asleep to? So it doesn’t really count, either. I gave those two works proper reads many years ago, though.

With mom

We’re still watching Mono, Paranoia Agent, Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san, Ojamajo Doremi Sharp, Sailor Moon R, Kodocha, and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. No progress on Hunter x Hunter or anything else. We also saw a few Community episodes together, since I was watching them by myself.

Episode 5 of Paranoia Agent wasn’t the best. It’s this weird sort of fantasy delusion thing? It was kind of evocative of Magic Knight Rayearth and Cardcaptor Sakura though. Maybe on purpose, or maybe it’s just generally fantasy and I’m just comparing it to things I already know.

Obama’s Elf + Anime With Aer

I’ve mostly been watching Sayonara Lara, Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, and Kaiju Girl Caramelise. Caramelise honestly got me to tear up during episode 4 because it’s like… yeah, being trapped inside a huge monstrous body, unable to communicate your needs and emotions to others, ceci n’est pas une allégorie transfeminine et autistique. Or maybe they’re just very emotionally stirring themes in general. Young Ladies has endeared itself more to me in the episodes after the first one as the blood has been toned down a bit. I was worried about what would happen with the introduction of these new characters, but I think it’s been handled well. SayoLara is just generally a really awesome show. We’re really eating well this season.

I saw a bit more Carmen Sandiego and Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir but kinda fell off them (not that I liked Miraculous even from the first episode I saw). Hilda, however, remains a humdinger, although I don’t watch it super often.

No progress on anything else. Not even Maison Ikkoku, I fear to say.

With @AernaLingus@hexbear.net I finished the first season of Oreimo plus the sequel ONA. I didn’t read Gosplan14’s spoiler, so whatever horrors await us in the second season… well, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get there.

Others’ Blorps

Garg has finished showing Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card. It was a good show but it ended in a pretty strange and abrupt way, i.e. the last episode doesn’t feel any different from any of the other episodes. Maybe the upcoming second season of Clear Card will rectify that? In any case I guess I’ll find out in a few hours what Garg’s gonna show next now that we’re well and truly out of cards to capture.

I caught individual episodes of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Dirty Pair 2, Hazbin Hotel, and Daria, the former two shown by Stalin and the latter two by Clara. I hadn’t seen any GITS content before, but I’d seen other parts of the latter three shows before, and my opinions haven’t changed much from before. Dirty Pair 2 at least has a bangin’ OP, though. I only stayed for Hazbin and Daria so that I could queue a cake day video I made for Garg, who joined Hexbear six years ago on July 31.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power continues to be a banger. Entrapta is an example of the ever-elusive “American moé” IMO.

Own Blorps

My showings of the 2013 and 2015 Little Witch Academia films were a big success. I’m really looking forward to watching the 2017 series starting on Saturday. My showings of season 1 of The Boondocks have also been a huge success: I’ll be finishing my showing of season 1 on Wednesday, where I’ll also show some fanime afterwards. Wednesday after that, I’ll start doing watch parties for Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~The Memories of Phantasm~, which I’m really looking forward to.

I finished my showings of season 2 of The Owl House last Saturday. ElChapoDeChapo presented an interesting analysis of the last few episodes of season 2 as actually being about the show’s cancellation. I also played an audio version of an essay I wrote about art, piracy, and “treat discourse” during the intermissions for the last six episodes, and that essay was a big hit with the other blorpers. That made it a pretty special watch party.

I’m also continuing to show Star vs the Forces of Evil. We’re in the stretch of the show where it really starts coming into its own. Last SVTFOE watch party introduced Mina Loveberry, the next one (this Saturday) will introduce Kelly. A few more watch parties after this and Hekapoo will finally make her debut. It’s kinda wild revisiting this sort of show, and characters you thought were a part of it since the beginning were actually introduced way later.

Anyways, Mina Loveberry is kinda like Entrapta meets Sailor Moon. Of course, Mina was before Entrapta, so the inspiration was probably (if anything) the other way around; but the Sailor Moon influence is very obvious in hindsight, and that’s another thing that’s fun about revisiting these sorts of old favorites: picking up on influences and references that went completely over your head the first time, or which you couldn’t really appreciate the first time.

I’m still using Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors and Joshua Jones as dead air material, but there aren’t many Joshes left. After Josh I’ll start showing Star Hill Ponies. Magic Heart will still last us a while, especially when counting the unofficial fan continuation.

You’d expect it to be catshit…

What’s with the random AI gibberish letters in the first paragraph?! I mean it’s one thing to use GenAI for the picture in the infobox (bad enough tbh), but using it for the text itself is a very strange move.

13 minut do starta! (art by Dimfann)

Just under one hour to Owl House! Remember that we’re starting half an hour earlier than usual.