/Artists
/Books/Comics
/Ephemera
/Film
/Games
/Music
/TV
/Visual Novels
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/3D | Outstanding 3D animation to my particular taste.
/Action | Featuring exciting and tense action to my particular taste.
/Androgyny | Relating to ambiguous gender presentation.
/Antihero | Containing a primary character with deep and ugly flaws that I find nonetheless sympathetic. Individuals who make awful decisions, who I might hate were they real people.
/Aquatic | Relating to bodies of water.
/Art | Relating to depicting the process of creating art.
/Atmosphere | The ability to create and sustain an evocative mood. Something that I enjoy simply existing within.
/Audacious | Shit that makes me throw my hands up in the air and go "yeah, sure, okay".
/Brutalism | Conk creet.
/Biomechanical | Relating to designs blending mechanical and biological components.
/Borderline | Depicting unstable, obsessive, and self destructive emotions.
/Contrarian | That thing you like? It's bad. And that thing you don't like? Well, heh, it's good. Stuff that made me learn to take pleasure in disagreement.
/Cute Boys | What a cute boy! Containing one or multiple boys who are cute. Largely self explanatory.
/Difficulty | Interactive works that present a significant and rewarding challenge.
/Discomfort | Renders a feeling of intense unease, often difficult to put myself through.
/Erotic | Sexually motivating to my particular taste.
/Existential | Relating to death, regret, and the passage of time.
/Furry | Fuckinnnnn... anminal people.. crazy.
/Gore | Containing beautiful depictions of intense anatomical disruption.
/Harsh | Containing abrasive and unconventional sounds and/or imagery.
/Humour | Funny to my particular taste.
/Immersion | Works with a focus on presenting a tangible and detailed world. The world as a character.
/Identity | Characters that I deeply relate to, or that helped shape my sense of self.
/Lyrics | Musical works featuring lyrical content that resonates with me. Usuaully not something I highly value in songs.
/Male Beauty | Depictions of male beauty to my specific taste. Notably distinct from Cute Boys.
/Mecha | Focus on depictions of humanoid or semi-humanoid mechanics, including robots, exo-suits, or mechs.
/Miltech | Depictions of military technologies, not including mecha.
/Misery | Works that dwell in and explore the feeling of deep and persistent unhappiness.
/Movement | Interactive works with responsive and satisfying character movement.
/Nonhumans | Relating to characters who look, sound, and act human, but are not.
/Nostalgia | Works that primarily impacted me in childhood.
/Peak Dogshit | Works that are sublimely bad.
/Production | desc
/Psionics | Relating to supernatural sensory ability, such at telepathy and foresight.
/Romance | Depictions of romantic love that I personally find compelling.
/Sexuality | Relating to explorations of sexual orientation and desire.
/Soundtrack | Containing a soundtrack (or insert songs) of particularly high quality and interest.
/Space | Relating to settings taking place at least partially away from planets, particularly depictions of spacecraft.
/Steampunk | Containing a blend of historic and science fiction elements based mostly on the period from late 1700s to early 1900s. Not all of these are technically Steampunk, but they are all at least adjascent to that particular type of retrofuturism.
/Transformative | Works that directly implement other art into their body for the purpose of remixing or recontextualising.
/Warm Horror | Works that simultaneously balance cuteness, warmth, and sincerity with violence, darkness, and horror. It is a very specific and rare blend, not to be confused with horror disguising itself with cuteness. Works capable of interchangabley disturbing and comforting the viewer while retaining a consistent overall tone.
/
/Books/Comics | + | Confessions of a Mask | Existential, Identity, Male Beauty, Misery, Sexuality | My first exposure to Yukio Mishima after multiple friends independently told me I should read his stuff in the space of maybe a week. I was immediately gripped, hurtling between the thoughts "he's so fucking real" and "what the fuck is he talking about". It is a really heartwrenching and sincere look at homosexuality in a society that severely punishes it. The immensity of yearning is palpable and crushing.
/Books/Comics | + | Look Back | Art, Existential, Identity | Every time I read this or watch the film I cry and don't want to talk to anyone for a few hours. I see a lot of myself and of the person I wish I was in Kyomoto. It kills me a little bit that I never had any support for my art growing up - no peers and nobody to teach me. In that way Look Back is to me as much wish fulfillment as it is tragedy.
/Books/Comics | + | Stand Still Stay Silent | Atmosphere, Cute Boys, Gore, Identity, Immersion, Warm Horror | Absolutely critical piece of work in regards to my artistic output. I discovered it when I was 17 and it altered the trajectory of my life. It's utterly beautiful, funny, horrifying, and heartwarming. The limited use of colour is particularly astonishing and distinctive.
It directly inspired a lot of my drawing and worldbuilding, with traces of it clearly visible in my art and writing years later. I love the art and the tone - which somehow managed to be adorable and soft one page and stomach-churningly horrifying the next, without ever feeling discordant - but the characters certainly influenced me the most. I'm literally named after Lalli. He's cute and small and effeminate but also clearly a boy, and I love his awkward but quietly affectionate relationship with Emil. /Ephemera | + | Bionicle | Aquatic, Atmosphere, Biomechanical, Nostalgia | There's no good way to summarise how massive Bionicle felt to me when I was a child. It dominated by conscious brain from the ages of maybe four to ten. It was this constant, every few months you'd go to the Woolworths or wherever and there would be a new, seemingly endless array of beautiful and evocative canisters containing new parts, colours, characters, and ideas.
I feel that Lego mostly fails as a product in the 21st century because all the models are too well designed for you to want to take them apart - anything a child builds will simply be worse than following the instructions. But that is not the case with Bionicle; the system is simple and flexible enough that the coolest Bionicle will always be one that you built. It helps that most of the sets feel a little incomplete, missing sections of armour or lacking in weapons. There's always some flaw begging you to flesh it out a little more with your own creativity.
It's not just the toy that stuck in my mind though. The lore of Bionicle is vast and unlike anything else meant for a small child. The world it crafted over the decade it ran for was strange and atmospheric, deadly serious and mythological in scale. I never felt pandered or spoken down to by the storytelling. When you're a child playing isn't just a game, it's not silly or frivolous, but instead a sincere attempt to tell stories and experiment with your emotions, so it was hugely impactful for me to have something made for me that treated playing with a level of respect and sincerity I couldn't get anywhere else.
There's probably never going to be anything like Bionicle again. It existed in this very specific position where companies were willing to take more risks and the internet was seen as a tool for creativity more than a marketplace. I have no idea how anyone sold the setting, which featured no humans or animals, as something at all financially viable. People think that kids are stupid. They think kids need stories about kids that look like themself in a recognisable setting with simple stories and no big ideas. Bionicle is proof that adults are stupid, because kids loved a story about totally inhuman biomechanical warriors fighting for masks of power and the soul of their dead god, while living in and on top of that god's corpse. And they liked it specifically because it was weird and complicated and they didn't fully understand it - because it made them feel like their intelligence was being respected. Kids are smarter than we think. /Ephemera | + | No. 6 (ep. 1) | Atmosphere, Cute Boys, Plasters, Romance, Warm Horror | [FINISH THIS] Absolutely insane opening episode for a totally nothing show. I do not care for No. 6; I might try the original light novels one day but the anime is extermely mid, so mid that I can't think of anything to say about it. It's almost good.
The first episode though, it's set four years before the rest of the show and has a totally different tone. It's about a well-off child in a far future city, and another child running from the state who crosses paths with him in the middle of a storm. The plot isn't important. It's about fear and trust and feelings you don't know how to label. It's about being a naive boy who doesn't understand why he shouldn't be kind. It feels like half the runtime is taken up by intense shots of raging weather. Maybe the rest of the show being disappointing is an extension of the idea that there is beauty that is too pure and too real for the world to allow it to be fully realised. /Ephemera | + | Swimming Pools | Aquatic, Atmosphere, Nostalgia | One of my first experiences with a large body of water was on the first holiday abroad I ever took. I was very young when I fell into the sea and would have gotten pulled away by the waves were it not for the person who I used to call my brother. I cannot remember when I started swimming, but perhaps it was after this incident. It was so early that it's never seemed new to me. I love the smell of sterile water as I navigate the strange intermediary ambience of the changing rooms. Something about the decor always pleases me too: coloured tiles, plants, and tall ceilings. I feel like I could watch the water gently lapping over the sides forever, and when I'm inside I feel free. It is a totally different feeling to existing on dry land; gravity and locomotion are new and strange, and I have to pay attention to my breathing in a way I've never had to before. Before I can swim on the surface, I learn to dive underneath.
I do not know how old I was when I first went to Center Parcs either, but it must have been later because I could already swim the first time I see their pool. It's huge; starting with a long gentle slope that lets me slip into the water like a seal might enter the sea, then giving way to a massive deep end that swells with waves once an hour. It connects to loop of water that flows in one direction forever, surrounded by rocky walls and plants, and in turn connecting to a dark cave where all the slides exit. Outside the water is warm and tropical, I feel like I'm on another planet. I remember my first time swimming outdoors, I couldn't have even imagined a pool exposed to the elements. It's cold, and connects to a scary looking set of rapids that I won't be brave enough to challenge until I'm in my double digits. It's my first time trying a hot tub too, one that's warm and bubbly, covered in thick mist in the cold outdoor air. Everything about this is magical; for a few hours a day I'm in a different colourful world full of fog and plants, where every texture and sensation even down to the way I move feels new.
Then I am eight years old, taking mandatory swimming lessons at school; I am bad at it but I enjoy the smell of chlorine. One day we have to bring a clean change of clothes which we will swim wearing. By now I'm very familiar with the feeling of wet clothes, from rain, waves, or water fights, but the sensation of having every inch of your clothing soaked all the way through in an instant is bizzare and new. The cloth of my oversized shirt flows weightlessly around me. When my final exam comes, I swim mostly in backstroke. I go for four hundred meters, but I feel like I could go forever if I had enough time.
When I reach my teenage years I stop and I don't know why. My family goes on holiday once a year, and while I've never liked the ocean they do sometimes have a swimming pool, but I never seem to want to use it. I got quiet around this time. My parents notice I don't enjoy the things I used to, but they don't see how I hate being seen unclothed now. On one of these holidays I am touched again in a way I do not like, but I don't seem to make the connection.
Then I am seventeen years old and I have decided to join several of my friends once a week to swim, it's a good excuse to exercise, and I remember that this is a thing I used to enjoy. The boy I like frolics in the deep end, his long hair looks beautiful as it spills out under the water's surface. I race and lose against my best friend, and every week we're the last to leave, spending ages in the showers talking about anything. The buttons turn the water on for a pitifully short time, so we always take turns holding each other's down so the other can relax under the flow of water.
I am eighteen, almost nineteen, alone in a new city. I will have failed my first year of university, but it has not ended just yet. During some lecture I realise there is no point in me even being here. I join my classmates in walking down to the front to collect some papers, but instead of picking mine up I keep walking: straight out the door and off the campus, all the way to the room I'm calling home, where I stop only to pick up my trunks, towel, and goggles. I swim until my whole body hurts. The pool feels like a bunker, buried into a hill with little natural light scattering down the tall concrete walls. During my final months in this place my sleep schedule inverts. I wake in the evening and fall asleep at ten in the morning, an hour or so after the pool opens. And so the last thing I do most days is swim for an hour before dragging myself into bed with the sun fully risen.
Four years pass. I ruin another relationship, the same way I always do, but months later she asks me to go swimming. It's been years, but I miss her, and I miss the water. The feeling of being so near to her is strange; we change in the same room and shower opposite of each other and I really do try to ignore any feelings. For the first time in my life I am good at swimming, so it seems, and I do my best to teach her what I know. Eventually she builds enough confidence to swim to the deep end and back without stopping once, and I'm prouder of her now than I ever was when we called each other girlfriends.
The next year I find myself lost again. In a city where I know nobody and no vision of what the future might look like anymore. I have spent a year and a half burning bridges, and finally seem to have run out of fuel. Living with my mother is not the worst - I just don't like it. The pool I used to visit in college was destroyed, but they have a fancy new one near where it used to be. The ceilings are high and braced with thick wooden beams. I feel at ease when I swim here. It's the most productive way I have of hurting my body, and one time I even swim fourty lengths. I bring that ex here and she likes it too. One time I bring a casual and questionably young lover, one who I should have been far better to, and floating in the water with her makes me happy in a very pure sense. She says I'm surprisingly fast, and later gropes me in the changing room, so I am once again happy. Then she leaves the city, and I move house, and I don't swim anymore. /Ephemera | + | The Witness and Jibaro | 3D, Atmosphere, Discomfort, Harsh | "Love Death and Robots" is a show that embodies the term "mixed bag". Episodes can be anything from the worst shorts you've ever seen to the literal peak of 3D animated storytelling, and these two (from seasons 1 and 3 respectively) fall into the latter category for me. The Witness is just extremely good animation, with a very distinct style that I'd never seen anything like before. The whole thing looks horrible and grimey and sweaty, but very beautiful. I think the story it tells is very compelling too, I think it's about how modern isolation makes people paranoid and unable to get or even recognise help.
Jibaro is basically just the same but better. The headachey production now extends into the sound design, which is alien and disorienting. It feels like a perfection of what The Witness started, able to tell a complete story but more focused and without dialogue this time.
I need to point out that the director/writer of these, Alberto Mielgo, also worked on Tron: Uprising (which used to be the best looking 3D animated TV show), helped define the aesthetic of the Spiderverse movies, and made the Oscar winning short "The Windshield Wiper", which is utter dogshit and makes me question everything else he's ever worked on. /Ephemera | ~ | Chihiro Fujisaki | Androgyny, Cute Boys, Identity, Sexuality | I do not care for Danganronpa, not in the slightest. However, when I watched the first anime series I ended up latching onto the idea of Chihiro Fujisaki. I was a teenager at the time, maybe 14, and she immediately appealed to me as the weird cute girl who was only good with computers (around this time I was realising coding was one of my few skills). I was then, of course, forced to reckon with the fact that she is a boy, which troubled me when I found out, not because I suddenly felt disgusted or betrayed, but because I didn't. This was perhaps the first time I acknowledged my capacity for homosexual attraction, and was further fuel for the growing belief I had that feminine boys could be something other than disgusting.
Looking back at her now I have mixed feelings. The writer seems to have written a transgender character without realising, which draws in a bunch of baggage; she's realistically messy and confused, but frustratingly unrealistic. The idea of a boy crossdressing to escape bullying is utterly ridiculous, and while she is killed in textbook gay panic the moment she reveals her assigned sex to a boy, the story awkwardly tries to sidestep the obvious subtext. Her character ultimately seems to stem from the desire to depict transfemininity while lacking the capacity to actually sympathise with it. If you tell me to my face that Chihiro Fujisaki is transmasc I will kill you on the spot. /Film | ~ | Avatar Series | Audacious, Immersion, Miltech, Space | Why the fuck do I like Avatar. When I saw it in 2009 I did not think much of it besides the mechs being cool as hell. It then lay dormant in my mind until around 2022 with the release of The Way of Water. As happens to me, I was unhealthily obsessed with somebody, and they told me they were excited about that film so I went into it with an open mind, and it turns out unfortunately that it's actually very good.
I watched The Way of Water with a partner and a friend, and we all really liked it. James Cameron is nuts. He's literally vegan. Whenever he moves a billion dollars just sort of appears. The first movie felt kind of standard and predictable, but as the series has expanded they keep adding weird shit and new ideas that keep pushing the world forwards. Quaritch is really good.
I do have to say that James Cameron, and Avatar, do in fact miss sometimes. I think their perspective on real life indigenous peoples are flawed at best and hostile at worst. There is something to be said of a billion dollar film franchise that is so unapolagetically anti-imperialist, never once lending the idea that the RDA might have a good reason to do what they do, but this series is not perfect. Particularly in the first film, the Na'vi are directly and rather uncomfortably compared to real world cultures, pretty much straight up saying that the fake blue people are more deserving of respect than actual native cultures because their god is objectively real, unlike the useless superstitions of indigenous peoples. This stinks. Don't do that. /Film | - | Total Recall (2012) | Miltech | Why is this here? Does anybody remember this movie? Well I do. I watched it in the cinema for some reason, and despite it taking almost a decade for me to revisit it, half the scenes were permanently etched into my brain. I think it's kind of cool that they have electronics in their hands instead of phones, and it's cool when the protagonist has to cut his out of his own hand. The glowing hand phone projects a UI onto glass and mirrors, that's pretty cool right? There's some robots, they're a little bit cool. Some SWAT guys throw a grenade that shoots a bajillion needles with cameras on them into a room so that they can see everything inside it. The big elevator going almost through the center of the Earth is pretty interesting and evocative. Most cars hover above and below magnetic roads, and there's a bit where they have to disable a car's magnets to drop off the road, then re-enabled them before they crash into the ground. There was, uhh, a bit with some elevators that went in every direction. The love interest's actor is almost totally identical to the fake love interest antagonist woman, and there's a really incredible scene where fake love interest is disguised as real love interest, so when she takes the mask off she still looks exactly the same to the audience. There's um, uhh, uhhh, Bill Nighy is there?
Okay real talk this film is dogshit but I though it was kind of cool when I was 12. It fed into a bit of an obsession I had with the slew of extremely mixed quality sci-fi action movies we got in the 2010s that all totally bombed. I live in terror that somebody I know will watch this film and know exactly which bits I blatantly ripped off for my own settings. /Games | + | Dishonored | Brutalism, Steampunk | While I do ultimately like the second Dishonored game more, and have more hours in it, I cannot deny the sway the original had on me as a child. In my head, Dishonored has always been adjascent to Skyrim. Both of these were released within a year of each other by the same publisher, and to me both were mature looking action games with a historical setting, with the main differences being open versus linear, and medieval versus steampunk. At that age I couldn't buy many games, so it was always one or the other, and I decided that Dishonored was obviously cooler. I think this is where I learned the word "Steampunk", even though Dishonored is definitely closer to Dieselpunk, but both terms are super made up anyway so who cares.
I wouldn't end up playing this game until years after its release, probably because the trailer I showed my parents had way too much gore and beheadings, but nevertheless I ended up a bit obsessed with the concept of it for years. Up until this point I'd understood sci-fi and fantasy to be totally split, with knights and magic on one side and spaceships on the other, so Dishonored's retrofuturistic setting felt extremely new and different to me. It's clearly a historical setting, except they have robotics and electrical fields, but also magic. The blend immediately resonated with me, and inspired some of my very early artwork. To this date most of the settings I make my art in blend historic, fantastical, and futuristic elements together.
As for the game itself, I played it eventually, and quite enjoyed it. I think it's extremely well made, and has great art direction, but I also found it frustrating. Something about the design always pushes me towards the most boring playstle of exclusively sneaking and only using my teleport power, quickloading whenever I get spotted. I ended up having much more fun with the sequel and Death of the Outsider, which I think had an even stronger visual style and more interesting level designs. The second game also managed to sidestep my biggest problem - my drive to barely ever use my powers - by giving the option for you to play the entire game without any powers at all, which was an unforgettable challenge and one of my single favourite experiences with gaming. /Games | + | Lies of P | Cute Boys, Difficulty, Existential, Plasters, Nonhumans, Steampunk | It's one of the most difficult and beautiful games I've played, it's steampunk, and when it rains the water seeps through P's shirt and you can see the outline of his skin underneath. Probably my second favourite game ever. [FINISH THIS] /Games | ~ | Guilty Gear: Strive | Borderline, Cute Boys, Difficulty | Besides the year where I was playing Smash Bros for 3DS competitively during high school lunchtimes, this was my first experience with fighting games. As with many things in my life, I gave it a shot because a girl I had a massive crush on was really into it, and I wanted an excuse to talk to her more. The crush went nowhere, but I did gain a sincere appreciation for proper fighting games, and it lead to me getting more involved with my local community and making a lot of really good connections
So is Strive any good? It's okay. The character and art design is incredible, full of personality and style. I love A.B.A., she's sort of a BPD icon and her animations are lovely. Asuka has to be my favourite though. He's got a stupid mechanic based around drawing and spending cards while managing a mana pool, which gives him incredible flexibility while putting him at the risk of not having the exact moves you want at the right time, and also if you fuck up and lose your mana he takes double damage and can't use abilities. He's also cute, did I mention he's cute? I have a mod which puts him in a really pretty swimsuit. Other than that though, there isn't much in Strive for me. There's games I like more which feel better and aren't as frustrating. It's not my favourite fighting game, but it is my first one, and for that reason it's very important to me. /Games | ~ | Pokémon Black | Cute Boys, Nostalgia, Soundtrack | This game was extremely important to me when I was about 11. It's the first Pokémon game I've ever played, and the only one I've loved. The soundtrack in particular never fails to conjure sweet memories. I reckon Pokémon peaked here, because I played it when I was 11, but also because it was their last 2D game (not counting Black&White 2) and thus represents the pinnacle of the franchise's pixel art, and their last game to age well. I don't think I could ever return to it though; the magic is gone and I've never had a good time with a Pokémon game since.
It also contains N. He might honestly have been my first experience with homosexuality, though I struggled to label it at the time. He's the villain but he's nice to you. His hair is long and girly. There's a scene where he takes you on a Ferris Wheel ride which made me feel fuzzy in a way I couldn't place. Not long after finishing this game I would find a picture of him and the male protagonist embracing on the floor the moment before a kiss - N pinning down the blushing protagonist. This affected me more than any image I'd seen of a girl and boy kissing. Thanks Nintendo. /Music | + | Gorillaz, Humanz | Contrarian, Nostalgia | Gorillaz were my favourite band when I was a kid, by far. I had loved Demon Days, and became obsessed with the group when Plastic Beach came out, seeking out all their side-albums, extra singles, video shorts, and other ephemera. This interest would wane over the following eight years of no music, and I had essentially given up on the idea of ever getting a new album from them when the first single from Humanz released. This ended up being the first album I ever bought - got it online the day it released, and downloaded it to my laptop and phone.
The popular opinion is that this was their weakest album at release, which isn't entirely unfair. It's definitely more varied and less, like, listenable, but I didn't care. It's weirder and darker than their previous albums, which is immediately apparent even from the first track, and maintained throughout basically the whole record. I thought it was cool that it sounded different and new, but a lot of people disagreed with me, especially online. In fact, talking about this album lead me to discovering internet music review culture, marking the first chapter in my beef with Anthony Fantano. He said the Danny Brown feature was wasted on Submission, which is insane. That's clearly the best song on the album, and his verse is crazy good. It's discordant and hash, perfectly contrasting the smoother vocals of the rest of the song while building on its feeling of unease.
Honestly this album isn't amazing. There's not many tracks I got back to listen to these days, but it helped form my taste for more harsh and less poppy music, as well as exposing me to various new artists through its features. I think this is also the last Gorillaz project to have a strong identity; it doesn't have the multi-media approach of the previous records, and mostly lacks a narrative throughline or many good music videos, but everything they made after this had even less. So I guess ultimately Humanz ends up representing a strange turning point of the conclusion of my childhood and the beginnings of my adulthood. /Music | + | Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe | Atmosphere, Nostalgia, Transformative | Absolutely sublime record. I first listened to this as a joke, because the album art looks funny and the way it sounds annoyed my friends and family. It's easy to see what they didn't like; this entire record is slow, extremely derivative, and often sounds like a broken CD player, but unfortunately as it turns out I really like that. You can ironically listen to a song maybe five time before you have to accept that you just enjoy it.
I must have been about sixteen when I started listening to this, right when I was at a critical point of forming my musical tastes. It happened during a wave of transformative music I was listening to, including a bunch of furry music and Neil Cicierega, so it's probably a big part of why I've never entertained conversations about derivative works. Floral Shoppe is obviously good, and obviously different from the music it's building on top of. It made me realise the value and accessibility of remixing, and lead to me using my extremely limited audio editing "skills" to basically molest a bunch of real songs until they sounded terrible in a way that I liked. That's something I did for a while when I was a teenager. It sucked but I miss being able to just make stuff without worrying too much about the end result.
I should say that Floral Shoppe also has a cross section with other elements of my identity. For a time it got me very into vaporwave. To me the aesthetic has always been built on top of 80s and 90s marketing, leaning into the bright pastel optimism but contrasting it with obviously obselete technology and cultural touchstones, creating a sense of hollow but beautiful consumerism. It resonated with the politics I held at the time, and felt like the perfect antidote to the growing 80s nostalgia of the 2010s which cynically guestured towards the aesthetics of the past without saying or adding anything. As far as I'm aware this is also the second piece of music I ever listened to that was made by a trans woman, so if I'd known that at the time I might have figured it all out a little quicker. Ah well. /Music | + | Renard, Trauma | Furry, Gore, Harsh, Transformative | When I was a young teenager I didn't buy any music for some reason. I guess it hadn't occured to me that I'd be allowed to, or maybe I was worried that I'd waste my money on an album I wouldn't end up liking. Either way, for a while I only listened to music I could download for free, which exposes you to a lot of crap, but can also lead you into stumbling into really good shit that you'd never have found otherwise. I discovered Renard Queenston (and the rest of Em Essex's work) through a youtube tutorial showing how to turn a 2015 Bionicle set into a transformer. I'll attribute all that to having been molested a year or two prior.
Anyway, furries. Right. There's a few albums from Em Essex that I listned to a lot at the time (particularly some of the "BEST OF LAPFOX" compilations) but this stands out as my favourite, so it's the one I'm talking about. This is definitely the first furry artist I listened to, and the first transgender artist (I think Em wasn't out at the time but we still count those), so that probably affected me in some ways. More importantly, it definitely shaped my taste for music that sounds harsh and very loud too.
Trauma is a very raw sounding record, heavily using samples which it twists and blends together. It's also funny too, I used to be divided on the use of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme near the end of one of the tracks, but I've decided it's genius now. You may be wondering why this is tagged as "gore" - it's mostly because of the very cool album art depicting the jawless decapitated head of bright red fox-racoon hybrid, but it's also a reflection on the way the original release describes the tracks being "written / produced / tracked / mutilated". I think that's the perfect word for it - "mutilated" - less a careful reappropriation of the samples its build on, and more of a passionate ripping them apart and stiching it into something new and weird and beautiful. /TV | + | Code Geass | Audacious, Mecha, Psionics | Utterly inexplicable that I like this show so much. The art isn't pretty at all, the animation is decent at best, the characters are tropey and underwritten, and the plot is too convoluted to have any point. So why then does it regularly make me lose my mind once every few episodes? This show is crazy. It's nuts. It creeps up on you and makes you realise that yes, I deeply care about Lelouch fucking Lamperouge and I will interchangably hoot and holler or claw at my hair when shit goes down. It's audacious is what it is. Other bits I appreciate include the music, which has a weirdly mediterranean groove to it, the sick roller-skating mechs, and Rolo. I also think it's incredibly baller that they use an unexpected extra opening song for the last 3 episodes of the first season. /TV | + | Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) | Androgyny, Contrarian, Identity, Nonhumans, Soundtrack, Steampunk | The superior Fullmetal Alchemist. I'm joking of course, the manga is probably the best version, but I haven't read it, and in my opinion this is far superior to "Brotherhood". The pacing is far better, and the atmosphere created by the older art and more muted palette ends up depicting a much more layered and real feeling world. It was one of the first anime I ever watched and it set the bar high.
I'll admit there are some things Brotherhood does better; the overall story is superior, and it has a much more satisfying ending, but I can't help but feel it tells its story worse than 2003 does. It's too fast and too eager to undercut itself with misplaced humour. It feels more "anime". The openings and endings are about on par with each other at least, both are absolutely excellent.
It's impossible for me to talk about Fullmetal Alchemist without talking about Envy. For my entire childhood there was this particular image of androgyny that was exclusively ugly and deeply undesirable - bearded pantomime dames, delusional faggots with five-o-clock shadows, and cross-dressing serial killers (hey, even this show has one of those) - so seeing Envy really blew my mind. I thought they were a boy at first, but they have a girly and unambiguously attractive body, with long hair and an outfit made from a skirt and what looks like a sports bra, but they still have this masculine, boyish voice. I had never seen a character like this before, who was not only truly androgynous, but so obviously pretty - desirable even. That could be me - I thought, we were both small and scrawny with long dark hair and a flat chest. I wondered what it might be like for other people to see me the way I saw Envy and instantly knew I wanted that. Soon after I would start describing myself as an androgyne, and never again in my life did I ever feel any desire to be a man.
I fuck with Envy so bad. I'm also a jealous freak, I'm ontologically evil, I'm not actually human. They're just like me. I get you Envy, I get why you did all that. Pleeease let me hit. /TV | + | RahXephon | Art, Atmosphere, Audacious, Discomfort, Mecha, Soundtrack | Like if Evangelion was more boring and confusing aka. better. RahXephon is kind of carried by it's extremely good score by Ichiko Hashimoto. [FINISH THIS] /TV | ~ | Kill la Kill | Audacious | Literally the first full anime I ever watched so it was all kind of downhill from here. I got into it because for some reason everyone who played Warframe in 2013 also loved this show. I do love how zany and energetic it is, and I think it does actually have something interesting to say about nudity and shame. But at the same time it's definitely trying to have its cake and eat it too; a good excuse to show almost naked teenagers is still just an excuse. Also cut it out with the voyuer and rape jokes, and that one porny actual rape scene. Jesus Christ. /TV | - | Gundam GQuuuuuuX | Peak Dogshit | Literally the worst thing I have ever seen. Utterly bonkers how wretched this entire show is. A mockery of the idea of Gundam itself. 12 straight episodes of non-stop "hey I recognise that!" Vapid. Soulless. Cynical. I like the bit where the girl says she's in love with Shuji and he immediately looks slightly uncomfortable, pushes her away, and straight up leaves the show. The cake that kills you. /Visual Novels | + | DRAMAtical Murder | Atmosphere, Cute Boys, Erotic, Gore, Romance, Soundtrack, Warm Horror | It is difficult to overstate the impact this game had on me. Most of society seems to have wordlessly agreed that erotica and art are separate categories. Whenever anything erotic tries to be artful it does so by undermining its core, as if the more its waters itself down and the more it leaves to the imagination, the closer it gets to being real art. I think that line of thinking is moronic and prudish, and DRAMAtical Murder totally vindicated me. This is an excellently crafted game (oh my god the soundtrack is so unreasonably good) with a story that's not good in spite of containing graphic depictions of sex, but one that would fall apart without them.
Personally I have always struggled with romance because I find it difficult to place myself into either character's position. Straight romance is too tied up in the inevitability of marriage, vaginal sex, and babies, all of which are extremely far from anything I'm interested in, and lesbian romance isn't much better. You might think there'd be something in there for me, considering that every serious relationship I've ever had could be considered a lesbian one, but aside from the anatomical differences, I rarely find myself connecting with the sorts of characters and situations in these stories. Perhaps I find it harder to put myself in the shoes of a cis girl dating cis girls, than I do putting myself in the shoes of an effeminate boy who likes the "wrong" things and dates the same sex. I'm a faggot, Aoba is a faggot, this makes sense.
I had been dabbling in yaoi since I was quite young, to the extent that by the age of fifteen I was keenly aware that I would have no qualms loving another boy, and later that year when I did start having sex with a cis girl I would get really jealous ruin the mood by crying and stuff. I didn't realise I was just gay though, because our society has very strong stereotypes about what being gay looks like, and I knew I wasn't that. I never liked beards or leather or hairy muscular chests, and I wasn't a drag queen either. In much the same way, I wrote off yaoi for the longest time because I couldn't imagine it would be capable of reflecting a sincere expression of romance and eroticism that I could actually relate to. To me, the genre was all bara or SuperWhoLock adjascent bullshit.
And so, when I read DRAMAtical Murder at the start of 2025, I felt suddenly and jarringly recognised. This thing, this version of sexuality, was something I had given up on so thoughroughly that I had stopped imagining it even could exist outside of extremely niche text posts and the occasional isolated drawing. Immediately I was envigorated, I began writing romance into my own stories, then realising romance was my favourite genre to write. My drawings changed, inspired by beautiful depictions of the effeminate male form I started doing serious reference studies, leading to the greatest acceleration in my artistic ability I have ever had. Desperate to re-capture the feeling it gave me, I sought out other BLVNs, then manga, and then real books made from paper. Good ones too. I probably wouldn't have read any Yukio Mishima if I hadn't become fixated on erotic and gorey depictions of feminine male beauty as found in this visual novel.
Finally and perhaps embarrassingly, it started to twist my identity too; I saw myself in effeminate masculinity, in the transplanting of girlishness onto a male form. I'm not saying that DRAMAtical Murder made me identify as a boy again, but it did happen around the same time. /
It directly inspired a lot of my drawing and worldbuilding, with traces of it clearly visible in my art and writing years later. I love the art and the tone - which somehow managed to be adorable and soft one page and stomach-churningly horrifying the next, without ever feeling discordant - but the characters certainly influenced me the most. I'm literally named after Lalli. He's cute and small and effeminate but also clearly a boy, and I love his awkward but quietly affectionate relationship with Emil. /Ephemera | + | Bionicle | Aquatic, Atmosphere, Biomechanical, Nostalgia | There's no good way to summarise how massive Bionicle felt to me when I was a child. It dominated by conscious brain from the ages of maybe four to ten. It was this constant, every few months you'd go to the Woolworths or wherever and there would be a new, seemingly endless array of beautiful and evocative canisters containing new parts, colours, characters, and ideas.
I feel that Lego mostly fails as a product in the 21st century because all the models are too well designed for you to want to take them apart - anything a child builds will simply be worse than following the instructions. But that is not the case with Bionicle; the system is simple and flexible enough that the coolest Bionicle will always be one that you built. It helps that most of the sets feel a little incomplete, missing sections of armour or lacking in weapons. There's always some flaw begging you to flesh it out a little more with your own creativity.
It's not just the toy that stuck in my mind though. The lore of Bionicle is vast and unlike anything else meant for a small child. The world it crafted over the decade it ran for was strange and atmospheric, deadly serious and mythological in scale. I never felt pandered or spoken down to by the storytelling. When you're a child playing isn't just a game, it's not silly or frivolous, but instead a sincere attempt to tell stories and experiment with your emotions, so it was hugely impactful for me to have something made for me that treated playing with a level of respect and sincerity I couldn't get anywhere else.
There's probably never going to be anything like Bionicle again. It existed in this very specific position where companies were willing to take more risks and the internet was seen as a tool for creativity more than a marketplace. I have no idea how anyone sold the setting, which featured no humans or animals, as something at all financially viable. People think that kids are stupid. They think kids need stories about kids that look like themself in a recognisable setting with simple stories and no big ideas. Bionicle is proof that adults are stupid, because kids loved a story about totally inhuman biomechanical warriors fighting for masks of power and the soul of their dead god, while living in and on top of that god's corpse. And they liked it specifically because it was weird and complicated and they didn't fully understand it - because it made them feel like their intelligence was being respected. Kids are smarter than we think. /Ephemera | + | No. 6 (ep. 1) | Atmosphere, Cute Boys, Plasters, Romance, Warm Horror | [FINISH THIS] Absolutely insane opening episode for a totally nothing show. I do not care for No. 6; I might try the original light novels one day but the anime is extermely mid, so mid that I can't think of anything to say about it. It's almost good.
The first episode though, it's set four years before the rest of the show and has a totally different tone. It's about a well-off child in a far future city, and another child running from the state who crosses paths with him in the middle of a storm. The plot isn't important. It's about fear and trust and feelings you don't know how to label. It's about being a naive boy who doesn't understand why he shouldn't be kind. It feels like half the runtime is taken up by intense shots of raging weather. Maybe the rest of the show being disappointing is an extension of the idea that there is beauty that is too pure and too real for the world to allow it to be fully realised. /Ephemera | + | Swimming Pools | Aquatic, Atmosphere, Nostalgia | One of my first experiences with a large body of water was on the first holiday abroad I ever took. I was very young when I fell into the sea and would have gotten pulled away by the waves were it not for the person who I used to call my brother. I cannot remember when I started swimming, but perhaps it was after this incident. It was so early that it's never seemed new to me. I love the smell of sterile water as I navigate the strange intermediary ambience of the changing rooms. Something about the decor always pleases me too: coloured tiles, plants, and tall ceilings. I feel like I could watch the water gently lapping over the sides forever, and when I'm inside I feel free. It is a totally different feeling to existing on dry land; gravity and locomotion are new and strange, and I have to pay attention to my breathing in a way I've never had to before. Before I can swim on the surface, I learn to dive underneath.
I do not know how old I was when I first went to Center Parcs either, but it must have been later because I could already swim the first time I see their pool. It's huge; starting with a long gentle slope that lets me slip into the water like a seal might enter the sea, then giving way to a massive deep end that swells with waves once an hour. It connects to loop of water that flows in one direction forever, surrounded by rocky walls and plants, and in turn connecting to a dark cave where all the slides exit. Outside the water is warm and tropical, I feel like I'm on another planet. I remember my first time swimming outdoors, I couldn't have even imagined a pool exposed to the elements. It's cold, and connects to a scary looking set of rapids that I won't be brave enough to challenge until I'm in my double digits. It's my first time trying a hot tub too, one that's warm and bubbly, covered in thick mist in the cold outdoor air. Everything about this is magical; for a few hours a day I'm in a different colourful world full of fog and plants, where every texture and sensation even down to the way I move feels new.
Then I am eight years old, taking mandatory swimming lessons at school; I am bad at it but I enjoy the smell of chlorine. One day we have to bring a clean change of clothes which we will swim wearing. By now I'm very familiar with the feeling of wet clothes, from rain, waves, or water fights, but the sensation of having every inch of your clothing soaked all the way through in an instant is bizzare and new. The cloth of my oversized shirt flows weightlessly around me. When my final exam comes, I swim mostly in backstroke. I go for four hundred meters, but I feel like I could go forever if I had enough time.
When I reach my teenage years I stop and I don't know why. My family goes on holiday once a year, and while I've never liked the ocean they do sometimes have a swimming pool, but I never seem to want to use it. I got quiet around this time. My parents notice I don't enjoy the things I used to, but they don't see how I hate being seen unclothed now. On one of these holidays I am touched again in a way I do not like, but I don't seem to make the connection.
Then I am seventeen years old and I have decided to join several of my friends once a week to swim, it's a good excuse to exercise, and I remember that this is a thing I used to enjoy. The boy I like frolics in the deep end, his long hair looks beautiful as it spills out under the water's surface. I race and lose against my best friend, and every week we're the last to leave, spending ages in the showers talking about anything. The buttons turn the water on for a pitifully short time, so we always take turns holding each other's down so the other can relax under the flow of water.
I am eighteen, almost nineteen, alone in a new city. I will have failed my first year of university, but it has not ended just yet. During some lecture I realise there is no point in me even being here. I join my classmates in walking down to the front to collect some papers, but instead of picking mine up I keep walking: straight out the door and off the campus, all the way to the room I'm calling home, where I stop only to pick up my trunks, towel, and goggles. I swim until my whole body hurts. The pool feels like a bunker, buried into a hill with little natural light scattering down the tall concrete walls. During my final months in this place my sleep schedule inverts. I wake in the evening and fall asleep at ten in the morning, an hour or so after the pool opens. And so the last thing I do most days is swim for an hour before dragging myself into bed with the sun fully risen.
Four years pass. I ruin another relationship, the same way I always do, but months later she asks me to go swimming. It's been years, but I miss her, and I miss the water. The feeling of being so near to her is strange; we change in the same room and shower opposite of each other and I really do try to ignore any feelings. For the first time in my life I am good at swimming, so it seems, and I do my best to teach her what I know. Eventually she builds enough confidence to swim to the deep end and back without stopping once, and I'm prouder of her now than I ever was when we called each other girlfriends.
The next year I find myself lost again. In a city where I know nobody and no vision of what the future might look like anymore. I have spent a year and a half burning bridges, and finally seem to have run out of fuel. Living with my mother is not the worst - I just don't like it. The pool I used to visit in college was destroyed, but they have a fancy new one near where it used to be. The ceilings are high and braced with thick wooden beams. I feel at ease when I swim here. It's the most productive way I have of hurting my body, and one time I even swim fourty lengths. I bring that ex here and she likes it too. One time I bring a casual and questionably young lover, one who I should have been far better to, and floating in the water with her makes me happy in a very pure sense. She says I'm surprisingly fast, and later gropes me in the changing room, so I am once again happy. Then she leaves the city, and I move house, and I don't swim anymore. /Ephemera | + | The Witness and Jibaro | 3D, Atmosphere, Discomfort, Harsh | "Love Death and Robots" is a show that embodies the term "mixed bag". Episodes can be anything from the worst shorts you've ever seen to the literal peak of 3D animated storytelling, and these two (from seasons 1 and 3 respectively) fall into the latter category for me. The Witness is just extremely good animation, with a very distinct style that I'd never seen anything like before. The whole thing looks horrible and grimey and sweaty, but very beautiful. I think the story it tells is very compelling too, I think it's about how modern isolation makes people paranoid and unable to get or even recognise help.
Jibaro is basically just the same but better. The headachey production now extends into the sound design, which is alien and disorienting. It feels like a perfection of what The Witness started, able to tell a complete story but more focused and without dialogue this time.
I need to point out that the director/writer of these, Alberto Mielgo, also worked on Tron: Uprising (which used to be the best looking 3D animated TV show), helped define the aesthetic of the Spiderverse movies, and made the Oscar winning short "The Windshield Wiper", which is utter dogshit and makes me question everything else he's ever worked on. /Ephemera | ~ | Chihiro Fujisaki | Androgyny, Cute Boys, Identity, Sexuality | I do not care for Danganronpa, not in the slightest. However, when I watched the first anime series I ended up latching onto the idea of Chihiro Fujisaki. I was a teenager at the time, maybe 14, and she immediately appealed to me as the weird cute girl who was only good with computers (around this time I was realising coding was one of my few skills). I was then, of course, forced to reckon with the fact that she is a boy, which troubled me when I found out, not because I suddenly felt disgusted or betrayed, but because I didn't. This was perhaps the first time I acknowledged my capacity for homosexual attraction, and was further fuel for the growing belief I had that feminine boys could be something other than disgusting.
Looking back at her now I have mixed feelings. The writer seems to have written a transgender character without realising, which draws in a bunch of baggage; she's realistically messy and confused, but frustratingly unrealistic. The idea of a boy crossdressing to escape bullying is utterly ridiculous, and while she is killed in textbook gay panic the moment she reveals her assigned sex to a boy, the story awkwardly tries to sidestep the obvious subtext. Her character ultimately seems to stem from the desire to depict transfemininity while lacking the capacity to actually sympathise with it. If you tell me to my face that Chihiro Fujisaki is transmasc I will kill you on the spot. /Film | ~ | Avatar Series | Audacious, Immersion, Miltech, Space | Why the fuck do I like Avatar. When I saw it in 2009 I did not think much of it besides the mechs being cool as hell. It then lay dormant in my mind until around 2022 with the release of The Way of Water. As happens to me, I was unhealthily obsessed with somebody, and they told me they were excited about that film so I went into it with an open mind, and it turns out unfortunately that it's actually very good.
I watched The Way of Water with a partner and a friend, and we all really liked it. James Cameron is nuts. He's literally vegan. Whenever he moves a billion dollars just sort of appears. The first movie felt kind of standard and predictable, but as the series has expanded they keep adding weird shit and new ideas that keep pushing the world forwards. Quaritch is really good.
I do have to say that James Cameron, and Avatar, do in fact miss sometimes. I think their perspective on real life indigenous peoples are flawed at best and hostile at worst. There is something to be said of a billion dollar film franchise that is so unapolagetically anti-imperialist, never once lending the idea that the RDA might have a good reason to do what they do, but this series is not perfect. Particularly in the first film, the Na'vi are directly and rather uncomfortably compared to real world cultures, pretty much straight up saying that the fake blue people are more deserving of respect than actual native cultures because their god is objectively real, unlike the useless superstitions of indigenous peoples. This stinks. Don't do that. /Film | - | Total Recall (2012) | Miltech | Why is this here? Does anybody remember this movie? Well I do. I watched it in the cinema for some reason, and despite it taking almost a decade for me to revisit it, half the scenes were permanently etched into my brain. I think it's kind of cool that they have electronics in their hands instead of phones, and it's cool when the protagonist has to cut his out of his own hand. The glowing hand phone projects a UI onto glass and mirrors, that's pretty cool right? There's some robots, they're a little bit cool. Some SWAT guys throw a grenade that shoots a bajillion needles with cameras on them into a room so that they can see everything inside it. The big elevator going almost through the center of the Earth is pretty interesting and evocative. Most cars hover above and below magnetic roads, and there's a bit where they have to disable a car's magnets to drop off the road, then re-enabled them before they crash into the ground. There was, uhh, a bit with some elevators that went in every direction. The love interest's actor is almost totally identical to the fake love interest antagonist woman, and there's a really incredible scene where fake love interest is disguised as real love interest, so when she takes the mask off she still looks exactly the same to the audience. There's um, uhh, uhhh, Bill Nighy is there?
Okay real talk this film is dogshit but I though it was kind of cool when I was 12. It fed into a bit of an obsession I had with the slew of extremely mixed quality sci-fi action movies we got in the 2010s that all totally bombed. I live in terror that somebody I know will watch this film and know exactly which bits I blatantly ripped off for my own settings. /Games | + | Dishonored | Brutalism, Steampunk | While I do ultimately like the second Dishonored game more, and have more hours in it, I cannot deny the sway the original had on me as a child. In my head, Dishonored has always been adjascent to Skyrim. Both of these were released within a year of each other by the same publisher, and to me both were mature looking action games with a historical setting, with the main differences being open versus linear, and medieval versus steampunk. At that age I couldn't buy many games, so it was always one or the other, and I decided that Dishonored was obviously cooler. I think this is where I learned the word "Steampunk", even though Dishonored is definitely closer to Dieselpunk, but both terms are super made up anyway so who cares.
I wouldn't end up playing this game until years after its release, probably because the trailer I showed my parents had way too much gore and beheadings, but nevertheless I ended up a bit obsessed with the concept of it for years. Up until this point I'd understood sci-fi and fantasy to be totally split, with knights and magic on one side and spaceships on the other, so Dishonored's retrofuturistic setting felt extremely new and different to me. It's clearly a historical setting, except they have robotics and electrical fields, but also magic. The blend immediately resonated with me, and inspired some of my very early artwork. To this date most of the settings I make my art in blend historic, fantastical, and futuristic elements together.
As for the game itself, I played it eventually, and quite enjoyed it. I think it's extremely well made, and has great art direction, but I also found it frustrating. Something about the design always pushes me towards the most boring playstle of exclusively sneaking and only using my teleport power, quickloading whenever I get spotted. I ended up having much more fun with the sequel and Death of the Outsider, which I think had an even stronger visual style and more interesting level designs. The second game also managed to sidestep my biggest problem - my drive to barely ever use my powers - by giving the option for you to play the entire game without any powers at all, which was an unforgettable challenge and one of my single favourite experiences with gaming. /Games | + | Lies of P | Cute Boys, Difficulty, Existential, Plasters, Nonhumans, Steampunk | It's one of the most difficult and beautiful games I've played, it's steampunk, and when it rains the water seeps through P's shirt and you can see the outline of his skin underneath. Probably my second favourite game ever. [FINISH THIS] /Games | ~ | Guilty Gear: Strive | Borderline, Cute Boys, Difficulty | Besides the year where I was playing Smash Bros for 3DS competitively during high school lunchtimes, this was my first experience with fighting games. As with many things in my life, I gave it a shot because a girl I had a massive crush on was really into it, and I wanted an excuse to talk to her more. The crush went nowhere, but I did gain a sincere appreciation for proper fighting games, and it lead to me getting more involved with my local community and making a lot of really good connections
So is Strive any good? It's okay. The character and art design is incredible, full of personality and style. I love A.B.A., she's sort of a BPD icon and her animations are lovely. Asuka has to be my favourite though. He's got a stupid mechanic based around drawing and spending cards while managing a mana pool, which gives him incredible flexibility while putting him at the risk of not having the exact moves you want at the right time, and also if you fuck up and lose your mana he takes double damage and can't use abilities. He's also cute, did I mention he's cute? I have a mod which puts him in a really pretty swimsuit. Other than that though, there isn't much in Strive for me. There's games I like more which feel better and aren't as frustrating. It's not my favourite fighting game, but it is my first one, and for that reason it's very important to me. /Games | ~ | Pokémon Black | Cute Boys, Nostalgia, Soundtrack | This game was extremely important to me when I was about 11. It's the first Pokémon game I've ever played, and the only one I've loved. The soundtrack in particular never fails to conjure sweet memories. I reckon Pokémon peaked here, because I played it when I was 11, but also because it was their last 2D game (not counting Black&White 2) and thus represents the pinnacle of the franchise's pixel art, and their last game to age well. I don't think I could ever return to it though; the magic is gone and I've never had a good time with a Pokémon game since.
It also contains N. He might honestly have been my first experience with homosexuality, though I struggled to label it at the time. He's the villain but he's nice to you. His hair is long and girly. There's a scene where he takes you on a Ferris Wheel ride which made me feel fuzzy in a way I couldn't place. Not long after finishing this game I would find a picture of him and the male protagonist embracing on the floor the moment before a kiss - N pinning down the blushing protagonist. This affected me more than any image I'd seen of a girl and boy kissing. Thanks Nintendo. /Music | + | Gorillaz, Humanz | Contrarian, Nostalgia | Gorillaz were my favourite band when I was a kid, by far. I had loved Demon Days, and became obsessed with the group when Plastic Beach came out, seeking out all their side-albums, extra singles, video shorts, and other ephemera. This interest would wane over the following eight years of no music, and I had essentially given up on the idea of ever getting a new album from them when the first single from Humanz released. This ended up being the first album I ever bought - got it online the day it released, and downloaded it to my laptop and phone.
The popular opinion is that this was their weakest album at release, which isn't entirely unfair. It's definitely more varied and less, like, listenable, but I didn't care. It's weirder and darker than their previous albums, which is immediately apparent even from the first track, and maintained throughout basically the whole record. I thought it was cool that it sounded different and new, but a lot of people disagreed with me, especially online. In fact, talking about this album lead me to discovering internet music review culture, marking the first chapter in my beef with Anthony Fantano. He said the Danny Brown feature was wasted on Submission, which is insane. That's clearly the best song on the album, and his verse is crazy good. It's discordant and hash, perfectly contrasting the smoother vocals of the rest of the song while building on its feeling of unease.
Honestly this album isn't amazing. There's not many tracks I got back to listen to these days, but it helped form my taste for more harsh and less poppy music, as well as exposing me to various new artists through its features. I think this is also the last Gorillaz project to have a strong identity; it doesn't have the multi-media approach of the previous records, and mostly lacks a narrative throughline or many good music videos, but everything they made after this had even less. So I guess ultimately Humanz ends up representing a strange turning point of the conclusion of my childhood and the beginnings of my adulthood. /Music | + | Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe | Atmosphere, Nostalgia, Transformative | Absolutely sublime record. I first listened to this as a joke, because the album art looks funny and the way it sounds annoyed my friends and family. It's easy to see what they didn't like; this entire record is slow, extremely derivative, and often sounds like a broken CD player, but unfortunately as it turns out I really like that. You can ironically listen to a song maybe five time before you have to accept that you just enjoy it.
I must have been about sixteen when I started listening to this, right when I was at a critical point of forming my musical tastes. It happened during a wave of transformative music I was listening to, including a bunch of furry music and Neil Cicierega, so it's probably a big part of why I've never entertained conversations about derivative works. Floral Shoppe is obviously good, and obviously different from the music it's building on top of. It made me realise the value and accessibility of remixing, and lead to me using my extremely limited audio editing "skills" to basically molest a bunch of real songs until they sounded terrible in a way that I liked. That's something I did for a while when I was a teenager. It sucked but I miss being able to just make stuff without worrying too much about the end result.
I should say that Floral Shoppe also has a cross section with other elements of my identity. For a time it got me very into vaporwave. To me the aesthetic has always been built on top of 80s and 90s marketing, leaning into the bright pastel optimism but contrasting it with obviously obselete technology and cultural touchstones, creating a sense of hollow but beautiful consumerism. It resonated with the politics I held at the time, and felt like the perfect antidote to the growing 80s nostalgia of the 2010s which cynically guestured towards the aesthetics of the past without saying or adding anything. As far as I'm aware this is also the second piece of music I ever listened to that was made by a trans woman, so if I'd known that at the time I might have figured it all out a little quicker. Ah well. /Music | + | Renard, Trauma | Furry, Gore, Harsh, Transformative | When I was a young teenager I didn't buy any music for some reason. I guess it hadn't occured to me that I'd be allowed to, or maybe I was worried that I'd waste my money on an album I wouldn't end up liking. Either way, for a while I only listened to music I could download for free, which exposes you to a lot of crap, but can also lead you into stumbling into really good shit that you'd never have found otherwise. I discovered Renard Queenston (and the rest of Em Essex's work) through a youtube tutorial showing how to turn a 2015 Bionicle set into a transformer. I'll attribute all that to having been molested a year or two prior.
Anyway, furries. Right. There's a few albums from Em Essex that I listned to a lot at the time (particularly some of the "BEST OF LAPFOX" compilations) but this stands out as my favourite, so it's the one I'm talking about. This is definitely the first furry artist I listened to, and the first transgender artist (I think Em wasn't out at the time but we still count those), so that probably affected me in some ways. More importantly, it definitely shaped my taste for music that sounds harsh and very loud too.
Trauma is a very raw sounding record, heavily using samples which it twists and blends together. It's also funny too, I used to be divided on the use of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme near the end of one of the tracks, but I've decided it's genius now. You may be wondering why this is tagged as "gore" - it's mostly because of the very cool album art depicting the jawless decapitated head of bright red fox-racoon hybrid, but it's also a reflection on the way the original release describes the tracks being "written / produced / tracked / mutilated". I think that's the perfect word for it - "mutilated" - less a careful reappropriation of the samples its build on, and more of a passionate ripping them apart and stiching it into something new and weird and beautiful. /TV | + | Code Geass | Audacious, Mecha, Psionics | Utterly inexplicable that I like this show so much. The art isn't pretty at all, the animation is decent at best, the characters are tropey and underwritten, and the plot is too convoluted to have any point. So why then does it regularly make me lose my mind once every few episodes? This show is crazy. It's nuts. It creeps up on you and makes you realise that yes, I deeply care about Lelouch fucking Lamperouge and I will interchangably hoot and holler or claw at my hair when shit goes down. It's audacious is what it is. Other bits I appreciate include the music, which has a weirdly mediterranean groove to it, the sick roller-skating mechs, and Rolo. I also think it's incredibly baller that they use an unexpected extra opening song for the last 3 episodes of the first season. /TV | + | Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) | Androgyny, Contrarian, Identity, Nonhumans, Soundtrack, Steampunk | The superior Fullmetal Alchemist. I'm joking of course, the manga is probably the best version, but I haven't read it, and in my opinion this is far superior to "Brotherhood". The pacing is far better, and the atmosphere created by the older art and more muted palette ends up depicting a much more layered and real feeling world. It was one of the first anime I ever watched and it set the bar high.
I'll admit there are some things Brotherhood does better; the overall story is superior, and it has a much more satisfying ending, but I can't help but feel it tells its story worse than 2003 does. It's too fast and too eager to undercut itself with misplaced humour. It feels more "anime". The openings and endings are about on par with each other at least, both are absolutely excellent.
It's impossible for me to talk about Fullmetal Alchemist without talking about Envy. For my entire childhood there was this particular image of androgyny that was exclusively ugly and deeply undesirable - bearded pantomime dames, delusional faggots with five-o-clock shadows, and cross-dressing serial killers (hey, even this show has one of those) - so seeing Envy really blew my mind. I thought they were a boy at first, but they have a girly and unambiguously attractive body, with long hair and an outfit made from a skirt and what looks like a sports bra, but they still have this masculine, boyish voice. I had never seen a character like this before, who was not only truly androgynous, but so obviously pretty - desirable even. That could be me - I thought, we were both small and scrawny with long dark hair and a flat chest. I wondered what it might be like for other people to see me the way I saw Envy and instantly knew I wanted that. Soon after I would start describing myself as an androgyne, and never again in my life did I ever feel any desire to be a man.
I fuck with Envy so bad. I'm also a jealous freak, I'm ontologically evil, I'm not actually human. They're just like me. I get you Envy, I get why you did all that. Pleeease let me hit. /TV | + | RahXephon | Art, Atmosphere, Audacious, Discomfort, Mecha, Soundtrack | Like if Evangelion was more boring and confusing aka. better. RahXephon is kind of carried by it's extremely good score by Ichiko Hashimoto. [FINISH THIS] /TV | ~ | Kill la Kill | Audacious | Literally the first full anime I ever watched so it was all kind of downhill from here. I got into it because for some reason everyone who played Warframe in 2013 also loved this show. I do love how zany and energetic it is, and I think it does actually have something interesting to say about nudity and shame. But at the same time it's definitely trying to have its cake and eat it too; a good excuse to show almost naked teenagers is still just an excuse. Also cut it out with the voyuer and rape jokes, and that one porny actual rape scene. Jesus Christ. /TV | - | Gundam GQuuuuuuX | Peak Dogshit | Literally the worst thing I have ever seen. Utterly bonkers how wretched this entire show is. A mockery of the idea of Gundam itself. 12 straight episodes of non-stop "hey I recognise that!" Vapid. Soulless. Cynical. I like the bit where the girl says she's in love with Shuji and he immediately looks slightly uncomfortable, pushes her away, and straight up leaves the show. The cake that kills you. /Visual Novels | + | DRAMAtical Murder | Atmosphere, Cute Boys, Erotic, Gore, Romance, Soundtrack, Warm Horror | It is difficult to overstate the impact this game had on me. Most of society seems to have wordlessly agreed that erotica and art are separate categories. Whenever anything erotic tries to be artful it does so by undermining its core, as if the more its waters itself down and the more it leaves to the imagination, the closer it gets to being real art. I think that line of thinking is moronic and prudish, and DRAMAtical Murder totally vindicated me. This is an excellently crafted game (oh my god the soundtrack is so unreasonably good) with a story that's not good in spite of containing graphic depictions of sex, but one that would fall apart without them.
Personally I have always struggled with romance because I find it difficult to place myself into either character's position. Straight romance is too tied up in the inevitability of marriage, vaginal sex, and babies, all of which are extremely far from anything I'm interested in, and lesbian romance isn't much better. You might think there'd be something in there for me, considering that every serious relationship I've ever had could be considered a lesbian one, but aside from the anatomical differences, I rarely find myself connecting with the sorts of characters and situations in these stories. Perhaps I find it harder to put myself in the shoes of a cis girl dating cis girls, than I do putting myself in the shoes of an effeminate boy who likes the "wrong" things and dates the same sex. I'm a faggot, Aoba is a faggot, this makes sense.
I had been dabbling in yaoi since I was quite young, to the extent that by the age of fifteen I was keenly aware that I would have no qualms loving another boy, and later that year when I did start having sex with a cis girl I would get really jealous ruin the mood by crying and stuff. I didn't realise I was just gay though, because our society has very strong stereotypes about what being gay looks like, and I knew I wasn't that. I never liked beards or leather or hairy muscular chests, and I wasn't a drag queen either. In much the same way, I wrote off yaoi for the longest time because I couldn't imagine it would be capable of reflecting a sincere expression of romance and eroticism that I could actually relate to. To me, the genre was all bara or SuperWhoLock adjascent bullshit.
And so, when I read DRAMAtical Murder at the start of 2025, I felt suddenly and jarringly recognised. This thing, this version of sexuality, was something I had given up on so thoughroughly that I had stopped imagining it even could exist outside of extremely niche text posts and the occasional isolated drawing. Immediately I was envigorated, I began writing romance into my own stories, then realising romance was my favourite genre to write. My drawings changed, inspired by beautiful depictions of the effeminate male form I started doing serious reference studies, leading to the greatest acceleration in my artistic ability I have ever had. Desperate to re-capture the feeling it gave me, I sought out other BLVNs, then manga, and then real books made from paper. Good ones too. I probably wouldn't have read any Yukio Mishima if I hadn't become fixated on erotic and gorey depictions of feminine male beauty as found in this visual novel.
Finally and perhaps embarrassingly, it started to twist my identity too; I saw myself in effeminate masculinity, in the transplanting of girlishness onto a male form. I'm not saying that DRAMAtical Murder made me identify as a boy again, but it did happen around the same time. /