More Thoughts on Pluribus

Last week I posted a video about my frustrations with Pluribus, and some of the responses have been interesting.

Lately when I post a video I get a wave of sticky anxiety that stays with me for a few days. There is something frightening about dropping the video over the cliff and into the deep, dark ocean of viewers - a distinctly unusual feeling, so different from posting here to a small, usually very chill audience of blog enthusiasts.

It makes one shudder. 

Many of the comments on this video, though, were reasonably similar to the comments on the Pluribus-hating post I made here a while ago. Yes, some agree, the plot meanders and the season stretches out its episodes in a sometimes unsatisfying way. Maybe, some say, Carol isn't that interesting when left alone for long stretches of episode time.

But some of the ways people disagree with me (and they sure do!) are fascinating. Maybe most baffling of all is the stalwart conviction that I can't be right about the season's position on the plurb, because they (the commenter) think the plurb is morally excellent. Regardless of your own philosophical wrestlings with the plurb as a force of good or evil (which, I have to admit to you, I do find deranged), the season makes it clear by the finale that this is a sinister force with absolutely no concern for preserving any facet of humanity beyond an encyclopedic pilfering of its knowledge. Those humans aren't in there! Not really!

Yes, the season wants to play with our moral view of the plurb, make us ask questions about whether there could be a net positive in such a complete takeover of human life, or at the very least if it could rock ass to be the lucky individual who gets to interface with the plurb as if it's a personal sex butler, but why is Manousos rushing to the action if not to be our vector for rooting for the plurb's reckoning and destruction? That's the arc, baby!!

Not that I begrudge rooting for a villain - I said I'd love a more evil Carol in this very video - but let's call a plurb a plurb here.

Another related thing I'm seeing is impassioned defense of the non-Carol individuals who love that plurb. No Lilly, people are saying. You don't get it - they accept the plurb because their family members are plurbed, and because to them, this collective mass is not such a nightmare. They come from more community-minded cultures, you see, and quite frankly they're right and I love the plurb and I wanna get plurbed myself.

And to that I say, okay plurb-lover, I get that you love the plurb and that you wanna for real get plurbed. However, there's a few reasons I'm not into this one. The first is that, as I said in my video, the season doesn't explore why these people think the plurb is fine. We don't see a single meaningful interaction between one of these individuals and a plurbed family member of theirs. We categorically don't explore what their reasons are for deciding they're cool with it, and I don't buy that coming from a culture which values community over the inidividual would mean you'd see a big alien thing that absorbs all of the humans you know and love as equivalent to said community. I think one could see that as a threat to community! I mean, community is a thing comprised of individuals, not a hivemind. They're not the same. Couldn't it even be reductive and insulting to reduce community-focus to this extreme erasure of the individual? Individuals can exist without community, after all, but community can't exist without individuals.

I would love to see a more complex view of these characters within the show. I'm not saying these characters are simply 'bad people' for having no problem with their apocalypse, just that the show gives us no reason to understand them. We don't spend time with them, and we don't gain any perspective on what their views are. Koumba is the only real mouthpiece for pro-plurb sentiment within the show, and he both doesn't offer a convincing argument (unless you love the no crime thing), and seeks to primarily use the plurb to have all the young women of the world service him indiscriminately. The plurb-lovers, then, come across as idiots and dweebs. I can't relate to them. And I don't think I have to, but it would be nice to feel that they weren't so much like cardboard cut-outs.

Finally, if these characters are so happy with the situation - with their family and friends being enplurbened - because of their alleged cultural predeliction for community, then why do all of them (with the exception of Darling Kusimayu) refuse to join the plurb themselves? You'd think if this was such a culturally defined moral good in their eyes that they would join too, but no - they're happy for their families to be sucked up into the plurb without consent, but when they have the choice: it's a no. That's pretty interesting. It's almost as if the show is categorically characterising them as a hypocritical group of thoughtless rubes who are willing to destroy the world and throw other people away for the benefits afforded to them in a mass-death event. Hmm...

But perhaps my favourite viewer response was one commenter's claim that reviewing the first season of a TV show, that judging an entire hypothetical show by its baby season, is like judging a movie based on its first ten minutes. A very silly one, but yes, perhaps. Let's all be quiet until father Gilligan feeds us a scrumptious fourth season. Then, some say, I may be permitted to judge.

 

This Hurts My Eyes

In my search for fun, unique, and satisfying online drawing tools, I stumbled on Rob Manuel's ZX81 Draw by serendipitous accident, and in a secret way. What happened was: I saw him posting drawings he was making with this tool on Bluesky and asked him if he was doing that in-browser, and then he kindly sent me a secret link, because the thing isn't intended for public use, at the time of writing.

Rob's frightening image of a dog.

So, lucky me, I have secured for myself a glorious new tool. And the great thing about this one is that it can very quickly strain my eyes. Yay!

I'm not familiar with the ZX81, a British home computer model released in 1981, but as you can see, it has a particular display aesthetic, comprised of some interesting black and white glyphs that can rapidly create a sickening kind of magic eye puzzle texture, if arranged optimally, that boggles the senses.

You're seeing the gorgeous art it's capable of here, and I don't think it's too bad just looking at these images, but drawing them made me feel genuinely nauseous, so I think this tool may be one to use in short stretches.

Fortunately, I am a fighter. I am strong, and I can endure such computer-based illnesses if it means drawing beautiful images that anyone on Earth would surely be delighted to see. And you know what else is great about these pictures? They're like, six measly kilobytes. I love that for them.

The Red Shoes: A Strange Movie About Women

I watched a Korean horror movie called 'The Red Shoes' recently, and it was a total accident, because I had meant to watch the 1948 movie of the same name. Oops!

Made in 2005, the most important thing to know about this film right away, is that the shoes featured in it are not red. They're pink. This has befuddled many an English-speaking Letterboxd user, many of whom cried and screamed and threw up when seeing these incongruent shoes - but the truth is: the Korean title of the film is actually The Pink Shoes. This is a simple translation issue. Mystery solved. Stop crying. It's okay.

Now, this movie oozes with a certain style. There's a fabulous blue-green colour grading on this thing, which means that yes, we are in Twilight mode. That feels right, and I love to see it. We open in a startlingly empty train station, where a girl sees these dazzling pink pumps, and thinks: yeah, I need those.

Sadly, her nasty little friend shows up and grabs the shoes for herself, but she promptly dies, so here we are right away with the truth revealed to us: the shoes are cursed, and they will kill you.

From there, we meet our protagonist who is mega-divorced (yay!) and struggling a bit with the care of her young child. One day she sees these damn shoes on a train, and she picks them up, because she has a high heel addiction and she can't resist them.

The movie feels very confused for the most part. Everyone simply starts acting weird because of these shoes, and we see about a million scenes of someone seeing the shoes and then screaming at the person who currently has the shoes. The mother and her approximately four-year-old daughter have the same shoe-based screaming match a number of times, which I guess is just what motherhood can be like, but I personally didn't need that many iterations of it.

Anyway, it turns out that the shoes belonged to an evil Japanese woman or something, and in the movie's greatest moment, we see a flashback of a stage set with an insanely striking Imperial Japanese flag during the occupation of Korea. This is where a dance will be performed (featuring the shoes) in front of all the Japanese soldiers.

It's incredibly arresting and you're thinking, oh wow, okay, let's get into some scary occupation stuff - that's amazing! But sadly, the movie mostly only makes vague allusions to this. Yes, there's a Japanese vs Korean woman drama about a cheating husband and murderous wife, but it all feels unfortunately soap opera, too focused on the deeply uninteresting personal troubles of the ghostly shoe-wearers, and neglectful of the genuinely harrowing setting with its immaculate imagery.

In the end, the movie has a strange and somewhat interesting view of woman-rage. We see the futile woman vs woman destruction sown by these shoes (pink, not red because... that's the woman colour), we see the creepy way it encroaches on the malleable psyche of the young daughter when she starts being sort of possessed by the shoes and wearing makeup, and we reach an immense freakout from our protagonist, too twisted by her reliance on shallow markers of femininity to cope, damning her daughter as a threat and an adversary in her pursuit of the shoes.

It's an interesting movie in its exploration of femininity as a spectre haunting women through the ages, but it has little to say on the matter, and is so one-note that it's hard to interpret as anything but a misogynistic tale of the fickleness and unpredictability of the ladies. They all just go feral with uncontrollable consumerism. It's just like with Labubus.

There are some undeniably haunting images though.

Two ugly shoes out of five. 

 ★★☆☆☆ 

Exploring Wigglypaint

Wigglypaint is a cute little art tool that runs in-browser and allows you to make adorable animated drawings, like so:

Who is this?

I've seen it floating around the internet for a while, notably used by veryluckyclover, who makes endless charming, tiny drawings that I enjoy, and there's something so irresistable and distinctive about the look. Those lovely wobbly lines delight me.

I've long been a fan of 'boiling' - Roobarb and Custard was such a great stylistic influence, along with many 1970s-1990s animated series that incorporated similar styles and were everywhere when I was growing up, and so it's really satisfying to make these wiggling gifs without having to draw individual frames. They just wiggle naturally. Good.

I've also been really admiring Svdpony's Flipnote Studio 3D drawings, which have some lovely dithering and incorporation of small elements of animation, and seeing these reminded me how much I love Flipnote Studio 3D - although drawing on a 3DS cramps my hand pretty quickly.

So I thought, hmm, I should locate some more interesting drawings tools like this. Wigglypaint seems popular - I've seen a good amount of reels and shorts and TikToks about it - but what else is out there? What other strange and beautiful art tools await?

I like Wigglypaint quite a bit - the default colour palettes are nice, the small gifs it exports are perfect, and I love its bouncy noises. It is a bit restrictive - those exports are very small, but I like the ways it limits you. It is, unfortunately, horrible to use on an iPad or phone. Strangely, the easiest thing for me to do is use my trackpad, which does feel warped and wrong to say - but using it feels good and right.

What can I say? Wigglypaint rocks. More wiggly paintings incoming. 

My Plan for Learning 10,000 Japanese Words

I've been using Anki for years to idly study Japanese in a wonderfully unthinking way, and I use this one deck of Kanji cards in particular that I am now just under 900 cards away from completing. That may sound like an awful lot of cards, but we're talking completion within a year if I learn three new cards a day, which is very doable and thus I can no longer make excuses. I must finish the kanji deck. I will.

This kanji means 'harvest'.

As for the attached vocabulary deck, no, let's not talk about it. That one hurts.

This big nasty boy has just over ten thousand new cards for me to learn, which would mean an average new card rate of almost thirty per day if I wanted to learn it within a year. This is too much. Not least because it would be additional to those new kanji cards, and all other new cards across my other decks (which I will not discuss here in order to stay focused).

The stats for my kanji & vocab decks, respectively. Let's not talk about the 'relearning' segment.

***

So I think my plan is going to be to just to stick to those three new kanji cards each day and learn those - nice and leisurely. I can't get too sucked into spending an untenable amount of time on this (I very strictly keep my language study to one hour per day maximum, because it starts to massively get in the way of more important stuff once it creeps past that limit, in my experience), but three new cards a day is wonderfully relaxed.

Me. I'm weak. 私は弱いです。

And then in one beautiful year, when I've crunched those remaining kanji into my brain, I can get started on the big vocab quest. Maybe I'll opt for ten new vocab cards a day, which would get me to the finish line in about three years. That's a long time, but we're talking about ten thousand Japanese words slotted into my mind, both aurally and visually, so I'd be very satisfied by that timeline.

I've crunched these numbers a few times along the way so far, and I've found that adding more than ten new cards a day starts to get rapidly too much for me, so going for a four-year relatively chill goal that allows me to spend a reasonably minimal time per day on language seems like a good option.

Mmm... wheat.

Realistically, I should probably increase that first number (three new cards per day) so that I can dip the ten a bit lower later on, but I'll experiment with that and see how I feel. I think I sort of enjoy learning the vocab more, because there's more information to attach the memory to (I learn the sounds of the words), so it might be easier to study a higher number of new cards per day when I've moved away from the kanji. I don't know.

Either way, here's hoping I can cram that stuff into my brain! 

Tasks, and Such

I'm in a pure sleepy mode right now. I'm getting aggravated by small things, such as: the presence of dust. Does dust have to build up everywhere, all the time? Or is that something that happens just to piss me off? Will they ever invent a computer screen that stays slick and utterly clean? Or do I have to be reminded of the unstoppable grease and grime of living by my own gorgeous devices? Many of life's domestic realities can make one feel put-upon. I should not have born, I think, to clean stuff. I should be a worm writhing around in the soil, coated in the chunky ground I live in. Worms must be happy. They must surely live a life of envious dirty jubilance.

Anyway, lately I've felt good about my scheduling. I posted a video last month, and I'm on track to post a video this month too. This is my most important current goal - and I'm there. I can be the true video woman. I can post videos. Wow.

Another important task, of course: filling my sketchbook.

There are many distracting tasks, ailments, friends, and other things threatening me, always. You know, you've got to go shopping, and you've got to read Stephen King's Carrie. These are non-negotiables. And inbetween these necessary tasks, I must write and edit a video. Luckily I am equipped with great powers of focus, and the ability to just fart out words. Does the video have to be good? Well, no. But I do hope for that to happen. Mostly, though, it has to exist. This is the number one thing about it. It has to be real, just as I have to read thirty pages of Stephen King's Carrie. These are indisputable facts of life. I am powerless to alter them.

And it's also true that I have to play some sort of High School Musical DS game. Without this, I won't be informed enough to understand the world around me. That wouldn't be any good.

High School Musical: Makin' the Cut! (2007).

Please wish me luck with all of my important tasks. I will do my very best to attend to them. 

Neglected Retro Games

It's kind of insane and magical just how easy it is to play retro games. I remember my first time seeing an emulator playing one of the earlier Pokémon games on a friend's laptop in around 2008 and thinking, "hell yeah", but we've come way past that. You can play long-discontinued Java games on your computer, you can play any number of C64 games in-browser, and you can play Ring Rage and many other arcade hits in-browser too.

Mermaid Madness (1986).

Granted, these somewhat more niche formats often have awkward control issues and glitched audio and so on - they're not as beloved and supported as, say, Game Boy titles. But that's part of why it makes me so happy to see them so accessible. They're lesser-known chunks of gaming history that have plenty of their own charm.

Take Jack and the Beanstalk for example, a beautiful C64 game about climbing that stalk. I love its insane-looking screens, its joyful sun smiling vacantly from high above, and its chunky little player avatar.

Cute.

The game is a nightmare to play. You have to avoid various insects and birds as you ascend the beanstalk, and those creatures go shockingly fast. An insurmountable, horrifying challenge. I love it.

Many of this era's games become, through their unforgiving gameplay, more of a sort of surreal and bothersome interactive digital painting. You enter their world and you are unwelcome. It's unbelievably awkward and challenging to make progress, and so sometimes I start to think of this as more of a distant cultural experience than a game. I'm just here, looking on, with wide eyes and useless fingers. Help me.

Maggotmania, a game where you get insta-killed if you touch a leaf on the ground.

The world is a terrifying place, and none of us are making it out alive.