PRINCESS MONSTER WIFE

catchaspark (Emma) modded a playlist exchange among friends and it ruled! I made a playlist for Catie, whom I do not personally know, which made it a fun challenge with regard to her tastes. I am secretly John Cusack in High Fidelity and I love talking about process and about music so LET'S TALK ABOUT IT.

Sorry this is so long and uncut, but that's what she said, and also every time I use cut tags on DW I run the risk of destroying all my formatting and I'm not in the mood for that type of danger.


FIRST: THE PARAMETERS

Of the prompt list, I felt automatically disqualified from #3 (my musical knowledge does not include any actual music theory and I couldn't tell you what songs are major or minor key to save my life), #4 (i've watched like six animes although a playlist solely consisting of the sailor moon theme would be pretty sick), #5 and #6 (have barely kept up with music for the past decade), and #8 (scottish? folk???).

I DID feel qualified for bangers to be gay or get divorced to. In fact, I have essentially made two previous divorce mixes--one about the dissolution of a very close friendship, and one for a friend who literally had gotten divorced. Those were both a long time ago, nobody in the exchange has heard them, and the track lists are now lost to me, but still I had no desire to repeat myself, so knew I would have to go for a different vibe. It didn't really occur to me to focus on #7, but I kind of used it as a taste guide.What I took away from this was basically that songs should have a strong beat and interesting lyrics, although I was sort of worried that the more lyrically simple pop songs I chose wouldn't be interesting enough and had to check with Emma (conveniently, Catie's roommate) to ask if an instrumental track would be okay. 

The other thing I used to judge Catie's taste was what I could find on her public spotify profile. She had a playlist called "divorce bops" which I did not realize was her own in-progress playlist for someone else in this same exchange, but I did visit it to get an idea of what artists she actually listens to.


SECOND: LE PROCÉSS

So like the FIRST thing I did was get distracted by another prompt in the exchange, "women experiencing insane emotions about other women or a rock or something" and spend a bunch of time trying to make a treat playlist for that instead of my assignment because i have ADHD, dammit. It occurs to me now that a fair amount of that vibe, perhaps especially the "or a rock or something," ended up bleeding into my actual assigned mix, but this was not on purpose. Thoughtful chin rub.

Once I remembered what I was supposed to be doing, and also acknowledged that my insane emotions playlist was not really coalescing, I just started throwing what was speaking to me on either prompts #1 or #2, sort of intending to build a comedy of remarriage narrative arc--gay love, gay breakup, gay get back together. Here I will acknowledge i was thinking a lot about my beloved ship Marceline the Vampire Queen/Princess Bubblegum, who canonically have this arc. I feel like I have spent my entire adult life agitating for Marceline to sing Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" to Bubblegum, which she continues not to do (although the song she does sing to PB in Adventure Time Distant Lands: Obsidian has some validatingly similar themes) -- but at least I could put "Hounds of Love" on my mix.

Another song that jumped out at me early on was "Cosmonauts" by Fiona Apple, who has always blown me away with her lyrics and, on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, plays extensively with beats. What I find really interesting about this song is how ambivalent it is about love--I had been doing a deep dive into the lyrics of FTBC shortly before making this, and read some great quotes from her about how she doesn't know if she really wants eternal love--and that made it very compelling for my concept.

In fact, both "Hounds of Love" (I'm ashamed of running away from nothing real / I just can't deal with this, I'm still afraid to be there) and "Cosmonauts" (what I've become is something I can't be without your loving / be good to me, it isn't a game) have lyrics that touch on the terrifying transformative power of love, how vulnerable it makes them, how it maybe even changes who they are in a really fundamental sense. Combined with another early gimme, Björk's "5 Years," which is really narrated from the other side of this fear (I dare you to take me on ... I'm so bored with cowards that say they want, then they can't handle / you can't handle love) I had definitely hit on something.

I don't know exactly how I got from there to "Bad Believer" by St. Vincent (another artist I can rely on for interesting lyrics and beats) but it stuck with me as I was reviewing her ~oeuvre while looking for the right track. [Sidebar: one reason this challenge was so fun is because it made me listen to a lot of music, including stuff by artists I love that I thought had the right vibe, but I couldn't easily identify the exact right song and who maybe had dropped albums while I was not listening to much music and I needed to play catchup. St. Vincent's self-titled album was one of many that did not get enough attention from me at the time of its release.] I felt like it really fulfilled the "repetitive backbeat, interesting lyrics" request from Catie and I love how joyful and irreverent it is about something that's supposed to be serious. It just feels like it could be about any sort of article of faith, not just religious: the belief in love itself, belief in another person, or belief in a relationship, for that matter. What if I said we are never ever ever getting back together, but we do? What if we swore vows before god and everyone, but now we're breaking them? Oh well! What do you know, I'm just a bad believer! For reasons I cannot articulate any more clearly than this, this song somehow became foundational to the mix.

"Bad Believer" becoming a keystone of seemed to unlock the weirdness within, inviting both high-BPM pop and more off-the-wall indie artists like My Brightest Diamond and Thao and the Get Down Stay Down (both of whom had released stuff while I'd not been paying attention which ultimately yielded my selections). These two also go together because neither of the songs I chose from them are really either love or breakup songs at all. "Pressure" is about ... geological processes? and "Phenom" seems to be about a societal reckoning. What they have in common is what feels like deep time, ancient and primordial energies being harnessed for one's own ecstatic ascendance. I GUESS this ties in, for me, to the "be gay" prompt ... not homosexual as in happy, but queer as in fuck you I'm an unknowable force of the cosmos. ???? (What IS the transformative power of love transforming me into?) ("Cosmonauts": you commemorate the penetration of the sun into the deep dark sky) ?!

IDK.

Besides Marcy & PB, I kept thinking about ye olde Beatrice & Benedick as exes (maybe) who get back together, so even though my narrative arc became nonsense and I just started vibing with it rather than trying to tell a linear story, I used a quote from them to title the playlist. At first it was going to be "double heart," but I ended up going with "a jade's trick" and then adding "I know you of old" because ohhahhah there's a double meaning in that ahhhaha hah fdh ?FS sdfkjchjkdc. Etc.


THIRD: THE MIX!

In which I attempted to sum up within one 300x300 square image what the hell I had wrought:



a jade's trick (i know you of old)

tracklist, and a little more commentary

1. My Brightest Diamond - Pressure

- I hadn't thought about or listened to MBD for ages but was actually reminded of Shara's incredible voice quite recently when I started listening to Hayley Williams.

2. Hayley Williams - Dead Horse

- I never got into Paramore, but I stumbled on this solo album of hers recently and was digging it, and felt it would go well with Catie's citation of Metric (also felt it would be too obvious to actually include Metric) (???). The vibe is VERY "bangers to get divorced to."

3. Thao & the Get Down Stay Down - Phenom

- The Thao track that I should have used, narratively, is "Marrow," but energetically it was wrong.
- The Thao track I almost used instead was "Meticulous Bird," which even more than Phenom is interesting lyrics over a repetitive backbeat, but it is.... too much about sexual assault. Sorry thank you Thao!

4. Fiona Apple - Cosmonauts

5. Janelle Monáe - Pynk (feat. Grimes) (lol)

- no song is gayer. Thank you Janelle!

6. Mitski - Pink in the Night 

- Pynk to Pink not why I did this transition, but very pleasing.
- "I've been blossoming alone over you" = ~transformative power of looooove~

7. Björk - 5 Years

- the song on the mix I've known the longest, by a wide margin. Homogenic has been one of my favorite albums of all time since I first bought it when I was getting into Björk as a youth.
- came really close to putting "Pluto" on instead for the queer dance party of it all but ultimately decided in favor of lyrical relevance. Plus I put "Pluto" on a mixtape I made for a guy in 2004 (i'm bISEXual) so I'm apparently not allowed to use it again. (???)

8. Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

- there's a really good cover by a Scandinavian artist called Eivør that I thought about putting on because this is sort of a different sound than the rest of the mix, but on the other hand, Kate Bush rules, so 

9. Talking Heads - Right Start (unfinished outtake)

- I did not intend to make this an all-female-vocals mix, but then I accidentally built it that way and it would have been weird to have any male vocals, plus Talking Heads lyrics are so very... Talking Heads lyrics. But "Remain in Light" is one of my favorite albums and it has such good beats, and then I remembered that the Spotify/deluxe version, unlike the album version I grew up listening to that my dad played all the time, has instrumental outtakes at the end. This was just the vibe I wanted and felt like a nice turning point for the mix.
- To me, this doesn't really sound like any canonical Talking Heads song I know, BUT if you listen to it first and then to "Once in a Lifetime" you can hear how they used some of this for that song - the guitar hook appears faintly under the chorus.

10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Mysteries

- NEEDED a Karen O jam but could not figure it out until the last minute. When I figured it out it felt so obvious since the vibe is both "ambiguous love" and "unspeakable mysteries that are fun but also can get fucked."

11. Carly Rae Jepsen - For Sure



12. Robyn - Ever Again

- Honey is another album by a beloved artist that I hadn't listened to enough! But this was perfect. Robyn is perfect. I hope Catie enjoyed this brief break for more mainstream pop because I DID!!!!

13. Emily King - Can't Hold Me

- Huge, huge shoutout to nonbinary queen Rebecca Sugar for introducing me to this song, which is clearly about masturbation, by including it in Steven Universe Future and having intersex queen Stevonnie do an inspiring rollerskate dance to it!!!!!

14. St. Vincent - Bad Believer

TALK ABOUT NONBINARY QUEENS. 

My dearest, Heather-with-a-comma-after-dearest, has asked for audiobook recommendations. I know for the fact this has all happened before, but I love her, so this may now also happen again. We proceed.

But first: I will tell you a few of my biases. Generally I find that audiobooks emphasize the salient qualities of writing, making the book even more... whatever it is. This can be a positive (for example, a funny celebrity memoir, charmingly narrated by the funny celebrity herself), but if the writing is flawed in some way, boy howdy can it suffer out loud. Wordy becomes interminable and unclear becomes incomprehensible. I most often run into this with writing that I perceive as sexist. A male actor doing a stupid falsetto for the voices of women highlights all the ways a book makes a mockery of its female characters. It is for this reason that I am extra wary of audiobooks with male narrators. I think this is also the reason (although she doesn't realize it) that my sister says she doesn't like fiction on audiobook at all. Personally, I prefer fiction to nonfiction on audio, because I am detail-oriented but cannot always keep track of details on first listen. By the same token, worldbuilding-heavy SFF audio is hit-or-miss for me, especially if I can't visualize how unfamiliar, invented names should be spelled. All of which is to say that this list is limited not only by my taste but also my cognitive quirks.

Also, 

- I can give TWs, content notes, and expanded opinions if needed
- yes I DO know most of the audiobook narrators by name and by voice too but nobody else cares so I'm not listing them here unless there are multiple recordings, which happens more than you might think
- most of these can be got for FREE from your local library via OverDrive/Libby or Hoopla Digital. New Audible members also get at least one free audiobook, AND, current audible members (for example: me) can share one book from their library with another member so what I am saying is I can send you one free audiobook that I own 
- finally: this list isn't limited to my absolute favorites. I certainly have opinions on all and complaints about some, but if included, you can be sure that I count it as particularly good either in recording, writing, or the elusive all-around. So:


Some Audiobooks I'd Recommend, With As Little Commentary As I Can Possibly Keep It Down To

MG/YA

Fire and Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore (please note these are books 2 and 3 of a trilogy - the first installment, Graceling, having been subjected to a very different style of audiobook recording which I disliked)
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz
The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale 
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
The Howl's Moving Castle series, beginning with Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour
Sadie by Courtney Summers


ADULT SFF

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (not to be confused with the podcast and its compilations; this is an actual novel)
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
The Arcadia Project series, beginning with Borderline, by Mishell Baker 
The Imperial Radch Trilogy, beginning with Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (caveat: I haven't actually listened to Ancillary Justice. I read it in print, and was happy to for the aforementioned worldbuilding reasons. Since the narrator is the same for all three books, however, I assume it is just as good as the other two, which are excellent)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (specified narrator: Rachel Dulude; I cannot speak to the other recordings, nor have I listened to the audiobooks for the rest of the Wayfarers series, but they're excellent books and are probably great on audio too)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (which is more of what I'd call literary fiction but it is so lonely by itself)
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine


MYSTERIES, THRILLERS, HORROR

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (specified narrator: Bronson Pinchot)
The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (not a series) by Shirley Jackson 
Sharp Objects and Dark Places (also not a series) by Gillian Flynn 
The Dublin Murder Squad series, beginning with In the Woods, by Tana French
The Lord Peter Wimsey series, which technically begins with Whose Body? but you may wish to skip to the excellent het romance beginning with Strong Poison, by Dorothy L. Sayers (specified narrator: Ian Carmichael) (but I really only recommend this if you are in the mood for rich white british people chatting cleverly at great length in the 1920s and 30s, which is a very particular taste)


MEMOIR

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (and, I assume, her other memoirs, of which she wrote SIX)
Yes Please by Amy Poehler
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (her other two memoirs are good too)
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby


I AM TIRED OF LISTING STUFF

Click here instead: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/952002-beatricks?page=2&per_page=100&shelf=read-listened&utf8=%E2%9C%93 

Enjoy!

Year in review? Eh, maybe later. Here's some dude's list of 100 books "you should consider reading," via yhlee . What I like about this list is how polite it is. Thank you, I will take it under consideration. Don't fucking tell me what to do.


( cut )

I did this meme every year for a decade. Then, for no particular reason, I skipped last year. It had been a big couple of months for me and I just wanted to rest. Too bad, though, since I had the perfect "song that sums up your year" picked out, as I often do think about what my answers will be to this survey as the year rolls along.

That 2014 song:

I wish every holiday only took an hour
that I'm not just like the people I resent
I wish one day I could truly be empowered
to say exactly what it is I meant

all I have -- it's in abundance --
is my perpetual redundance
it's hard for me to say
I face it every day

learn it all again tomorrow
learn it all again tomorrow

- Ben and Ellen Harper, Learn It All Again Tomorrow

And I did.

( 2015 )

As you may have heard, The Legend of Korra ended this week with a pretty exceptional move. I had stopped watching after hating the first season finale, but caught up a few months ago when I saw friends praising the improvements of season three. That meant I watched all of season four as it "aired" (Nick pulled the show from actual television broadcast several months ago, for reasons I now suspect had to do with the finale storyboards, and moved it all online) and got to experience this surprise ending unspoiled in the wee hours of Friday morning. Since then I've seen a lot of people asking if they should catch up because they too stopped watching during or after season one, and I am here to offer my opinion: YES! But not just for the finale. If your only interest is in Korrasami, tumblr's got you covered.

If you would actually like to watch and enjoy the show, here's what I recommend. IMHO, YMMV, &c.
( I will keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but some summarizing is required. )

If your network agrees with it, all of season four can currently be viewed in free high def on Nick's site. watchcartoononline.com or animeflavor.com may also be of help :)

P.S. By the way, this isn't the first episode guide I've made. Here's my Adventure Time episode guide, which is currently about 25 episodes behind, but for a show that has 178 episodes so far it could be worse (and should be updated very soon). It's a spreadsheet, but was designed to be used with filtered criteria, back when Google Docs still allowed "View as List". Now that Google Sheets is the status quo, it can be filtered in a slightly different way. Click on any of the top cells and then in the top navigation bar with all the icons, click on the funnel-shaped icon second from the right. This turns on filtering, so you can still select all Musicals that feature Marceline and have the list come up in four clicks. I'm not a regular nerd, I'm a cool nerd.

P.P.S. Semi-related to all of the above: I have a rather sedate and single-minded tumblr which is almost exclusively being used for my love of cartoons and illustration. I don't follow many people so as to keep my dash focused on the same kind of stuff I want to reblog, but feel free to follow if you like!

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woo

Taking a second pass at this because the first time I tried, as with most of my dreamwidth posts, ended in formatting hell.

( 2013 in review )

Dear Yulegoat,

Hello, and thank you! Yuletide is a lot of effort and it means a great deal to me that you are spending such energy on me. With that in mind, I truly mean it when I say I hope you enjoy yourself first and foremost. My sincerest request is that you don't force it; use my prompts as jumping-off points, by all means, but I'd rather read a great story written with conviction that I wouldn't have expected than a mediocre story that checks off every box on my list.

As far as that list goes, I've repeated it most every year and you can find it in my previous letters in my tag, but honestly I feel okay skipping over it this time. The stories I like the best are those that are organic, emotionally truthful, and nuanced. The stories that I like the least are facile, gratuitously sentimental or edgy, without consequence or courage. I love plot - partly because I can't write it to save my life - but I also love character studies, absurd comedies, and lyricism (though not extremely opaque prose). Characterization, sense of place, and tone will always win me over. Also girls, gays, and friendship! What can I say? Secretly I'm easy. Just no mindwipes, please.

For your visual learning pleasure: a tumblr tag just for you! (It is not distributed in proportion to my interest in these fandoms.)

And now, my six prompts!

( LUTHER )

( SEVEN KINGDOMS TRILOGY AKA BITTERBLUE )

( TEEN BEACH MOVIE )

( FINGERSMITH )

( DANCE ACADEMY )

( THE X-FILES RPF )

I hope this helps a bit! Again, if you are at any sort of a loss, my "yuletide!!!" tag has more, and really so does the rest of my journal. I am an open book with plenty of opinions, but at the end of the day I still want to see yours. Have fun and don't stress out too much <3

love!!!
Tris B



( postscript: ghosts of yuletides past )

HERE IS THE THING.

We make progress. We wrest it into being. Media is not passively received and interpreted, and there is no "representation" without the re - it is a reflexive, back and forth process. We are not given Thing That Is Progressive and are then moved along a square of the chessboard of equality by the invisible hand of the media. We spy and scrabble and steal from it things that were never intended or particularly well-executed to be bestowed. (Is that not what slash is? That is what slash is.) The author of fiction is, in general, dead; the author of fiction's real life ramifications was never born in the first place is, upon reflection, us.

After saying all that it seems a shame to narrow my scope down to a single fiction, but that was where this idea originated and it is a point I want to make -- but let's agree it's probably just one of many examples.

Star Trek: The Original Perfect Progressive Utopia never existed. That is not a show or movie that I have ever had the privilege of watching. Has it intended to portray a Perfect Progressive Utopia? Yes. Has it been progressive in some aspects in relation to some grave injustices of real life? Again, yes. I am glad for both of these yeses - they are a big part of why I love Star Trek. That still doesn't actually make the answer to the third question, which is the Jeopardy answer of that post, yes: Star Trek has been [up till now] so progressive that it's actually the destination to which progress aspires.

I could collect receipts for Star Trek's various injustices all day if I had it, but I don't so let's go with broad strokes. Nichelle Nichols wanting to quit. Denise Crosby actually did because she had nothing to do; Gates McFadden was fired for wanting better writing for her character; Marina Sirtis hated the Sexy Feelings Alien she was pigeonholed into and didn't get to wear a real Starfleet uniform for five seasons (and was mind raped in the very last Star Trek entry prior to the reboot). WHERE EVEN TO BEGIN re: racism -- played as alien parables -- experienced by real actors -- flaunted through the brownface of every major Klingon character save Worf and his brother Kurn (Alexander) (Martok and Gowron) (K'ehleyr). Ricardo Montalban: no more Indian than you know who. Basically every major Bashir storyline managed to be offensive in terms of race, disability, and/or his frankly skeezy-ass approach to women and consent. ~Commander~ Sisko. The continual and ever more conspicuous absence of queer people in space. And on, and on, and on, and on.

And yet.

Nichelle Nichols didn't quit -- not because of something Gene Roddenberry gave her, but because of a scrap of progress that Martin Luther King Jr. could envision. Mae Jemison went into space -- even though Uhura had next to nothing to do. Now she has more, and it's still not enough -- but Nyota Uhura is still not a white girl. All kinds of girls are still boldly going. On SCRAPS. Of course it's not fucking enough. Of course the whitewashing of Khan is inexplicable, knowingly offensive, and awful. But what the fuck else is new? People have been stealing scraps and building them into something better than Gene Roddenberry or Michael Piller ever imagined since 1966, and it's no different now with JJ Abrams. I don't have to remind you of the crusades fans are willing to go on for scraps of gay subtext. Some of us will always be crusading with and for the other scraps. Welding them together into sculptures of what we want the next iteration to be like. Still not receiving passively. Still trying to make real progress out of the perfunctory and pitiful. Everyone has their lines and buttons, and it's easy to understand why the reboot might not be an old school Trekkie's cup of tea. But chalking it up to acceptance of the history of Star Trek's progressivism at face value -- what could be more regressive than that?

Traditional end of year meme, take nine.

2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004

( we don't worry anymore cuz we know when the guff comes we get brave )

This does not include all the baseball I watched. I watched a lot of baseball. I just had to keep watching because my team kept winning (◠‿◠✿) So inconvenient (◠‿◠✿) Two World Series titles in three years (◠‿◠✿)

┌（★ｏ★）┘ └（★ｏ★）┘ └（★ｏ★）┐ ┌（★ｏ★）┐

OCTOBER MEDIA

COMIX

• Marceline and the Scream Queens #3 and #4, Meredith Gran

MOVIES

• Clueless (rewatch)
• Princess Mononoke
• most of the Lindsay Lohan Freaky Friday because I turned on the TV to watch something else but it was ON and it bewitched me D:
• Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School
• Clue

TEEVEE AS AIRED (unless noted)

• Adventure Time (+ rewatch all of "My Two Favorite People" + various other rewatches)
• All on the line (S2 + S3'S Domino Dollhouse episode)
• Bob's Burgers
• Dance Academy (S2 finale rewatch)
• Dexter
• Don't Trust the B in Apt. 23
• Elementary
• Futurama (Prisoner of Benda and Time Keeps on Slipping rewatches)
• Go On (episodes 2-8)
• Gravity Falls (plus a little rewatch action)
• Nashville (pilot)
• New Girl
• Parks and Recreation
• Pretty Little Liars (Halloween special)
• Survivor
• The Lizzie Bennet Diaries + associated media
• The Good Wife
• The Legend of Korra (episodes 1-4 rewatch)
• The Mindy Project
• Treme
• Underemployed (pilot)
• Veep (S1)

As it turns out, being unemployed and living on a couch in front of a TV with copious OnDemand is a pretty good way to catch up with television. But I start an exciting new job on Tuesday! You win some, you lose some, you sweep some. (◠‿◠✿)