General-Purpose Rabbit Hole Thread

To me a rabbit hole is not necessarily a "niche interest" per se, though it can develop into one. More like one day you get curious about something and two hours later you're somehow one of the world's most knowledgeable people on the topic of the career of Don "Creesh" Hornsby, or Bunty Pendleton, or something like that. 1940s Disney anti-Nazi propaganda films beyond "Der Fuerher's Face". I get from "Creesh" Hornsby to the Marx Brothers and then a half hour later I'm listening to the audio recording of the 1974 Xenia tornado made by a Native American resident of Xenia by the name of Brokeshoulder. That sort of thing.

Anyway! Anything along those lines, share it here.

Today's, spurred by a memory of something my Grandad used to say -

Ralph Dunstan observed that the waits (or "Wayghtes") were originally musical watchmen who patrolled an assigned district -- usually their sponsor's estate -- sounding the hours of night and morning. Later, they were hired by towns to act as watchmen. Dunstan writes that "They generally "piped the watche" in a sing-song or short tune. One of the historic Glasgow calls was, 'All's well; a fine night, and an Irishman drowned in the Clyde.' The familiar 'Christmas Waits' are a relic of the old custom."

i started out looking up the experimental films of tadanari okamoto and osamu tezuka (at least some of which have fansubs, i'm pleased to find out) and from there found my way to mitsuyo seo, the director of the infamous "momotaro" japanese propaganda films, the first feature-length anime. turns out he was apparently involved in marxist proletarian cinema of the 1930s, including a film called Sankichi's Aerial Voyage. searching the romanji title of this film turned up this chapter from a book on japanese cinema:

https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315534374-3

all the other chapters are unavailable online because capitalism exists and is bad, but this chapter is pretty interesting at least.

apparently there are some short snippets of prokino's work that survive, but they don't seem to be easily viewable. wikipedia cites them as being available at the university of michigan, but the movies themselves, in quicktime format, seem to not be around anymore. the page suggests listening to the "internationale" while watching the films, because benshi were banned from showing of the films.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110720093759/https://www.cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu/electronic/facultyseries/list/series/prewar/films.php

if anyone can turn up copies of the films online, i'd like to see them! i struck out unfortunately.

anyway, wikipedia also links to a page featuring an interview with two members of prokino, whose work, the page says, was featured at YIDFF '89. that's with a D. don't search it without a D. i mean there's no point, you do that and you'll find the D anwyay.

https://www.yidff.jp/docbox/5/box5-2-e.html

anyway! i somehow got from there to Gakuryu Ishii (formerly Sogo Ishii - can I say that? Is that deadnaming?), whose works "burst city" and "the crazy family" i know, but i didn't know ishii's work as a whole. nor did i know that The Stalin were in "burst city".

i also didn't know that he made an hour-long video for Einsturzende Neubauten's Halber Mensch. it's on youtube in crap quality. like no seriously we're talking 288p here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riey-AGJ7fk

most of ishii's films are available if you know where to look, but i blew my bandwidth allocation downloading old episodes of tiswas, a 10 gb blu-ray rip of electric dragon 80,000 volts is not in my immediate future. i did grab a short film of his called "the master of shiatsu", though. oh wait it looks like this one is actually on youtube, though it's marked for mature audiences only. so, you know. only watch if you're mature enough for shiatsu. and titties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhK4_owcy50

fantastic film. really makes me want to get a shiatsu massage. (i've already got titties.)

really ishii is someone who would benefit from a really nice blu-ray box set of his stuff. he's still alive and making films though so maybe that's a bit premature of me to suggest that.

oh, and apparently the shiatsu film is hosted on the alt account of a finnish folk band called korpiklaani that branched into metal because, you know, the kids like folk metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68L3fU164w4

i'm more a folkie myself, so i figured, hey, what did they sound like when they were a folk duo?

and that is why i'm listening to an album called "hunka lunka" right now. it's not bad, but i've heard better joik-based folk music records from the '90s. i'm not huge on the way the drums and guitar are recorded. the korpiklaani albums are better-recorded and mixed, even if i'm not so much into all the metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biV2AEvOH_8

ok so this is a thing that happens sometimes i was LITERALLY LESS THAN A WEEK AGO watching "all about mighty lady" and delving deep into the obviously-fetishy tokusatsu rabbithole. (it's not my fetish, but i got a friend who's kinda got a similar thing going on, he's into guys tho). hazel of course has a lot more knowledge and insight into the topic even though she talks about not having a deep knowledge of tokusatsu stuff, but usually she's talking about stuff i've never even heard of, like "elfen lied" or something. on top of that there's this same fascination with (because i was raised catholic) i call the _accidents_ of media, the... they're not always material qualities, sometimes they're bad encodes, mp3s that have to be "uncooked" (remember those?), the fly crawling on the screen during the telerecording of episode 2 of "the quatermass experiment".

i also found something that purports to be the fifth episode of a late 1970s italian tv series called "the fifth glacial era", though it's possibly the only episode, maybe they just decided to number their episodes the way l'infonie numbered their albums.

i don't know why but i'm still doing a tokusatsu deep dive, reading about this guy, who made the "butterfly dream" episode of "ultraman max":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Jissoji

Every project he directed, from children's action shows to disturbing adult films had an uncompromising approach to cinematic story telling. His episodes of the Ultraman TV shows are unique and quite unusual for children's television. His career is also unusual in that he went back and forth from children's television to film projects that were sexually provocative in some way or another. It is perhaps this aspect of his work that has prevented wider distribution of his films.

"sexually provocative" seems to mean "extreme misogyny" so, uh, i'm not necessarily hyped to see some of that stuff

"tokyo: the last megalopolis" seems like it's interesting, though, any movie that gets compared to david lynch's dune is gonna catch my interest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jsLJ3MEXVo

went from reading about "You Got The Silver" to Kilby Snow, "regarded by many as the first modern autoharp player".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewfhy9R90u4

he sounds good, though! as opposed to sturle dagsland who... i'm just gonna say that whatever they're doing i don't think i get it.

I think I missed this thread being started despite hoping for it elsewhere. Some great stuff.

Today I scrolled past a clickbaity listicle about hotels making somebody a blanket fort, which prompted me to do my semi-regular browsing of the Landmark Trust site and their listed buildings/follies you can stay in (this is not so much a rabbit hole as me daydreaming about being able to afford a nice holiday), which spun me off into 'weird hotels in Europe', and, well... I found this place.

CasAnus, aka the Anus House
https://d3nslrukb9lhwg.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2016/07/Hotel-CasAnus-Antwerp-Belgium-e1467649536106.jpg

the next time a fascist starts going off about the inherent superiority of european culture i'll... well, walk away and not talk to them, probably, but i'll be thinking of this hotel.

anyway today i'm checking out this very hyped new super metroid hack called "super junkoid", from initial impressions it seems like it has sort of an earthbound/undertale aesthetic on top of super metroid gameplay...

"I want to make baseball metal. I want to make everything metal. Blacker than the blackest black times infinity!" says someone on Discord.

Is there metal music about baseball? I look and all I find is walk-up music. I know about the Baseball Project. Are their songs about baseball? they are. they have a new album, with a video about the infamous "disco demolition night", an event which the baseball project represents - not without reason - as basically a race riot.

the video includes footage of the riots which has me looking for original footage... so often i wind up coming back to the fuzzy memories channel, which put up a 40th anniversary compilation of footage four years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqDkBM9vxw8

it's fuzzy memories and obsolete video, they're both amazing when it comes to '70s off-air recordings... i'm super into both of their uploads.

trying to get specific recording dates for a bunch of the early devo demos... nerding about about chronology... anyway, the wiki claims that a sound from "auto modown" was used for the transformers transforming sequence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8FgDmo_9sY

i'm not sure how, uh, plausible this is... it sounds similar, and auto modown was recorded in 1974, and mark mothersbaugh has done a lot of work in hollywood, but the song wasn't released until 1990. fuck knows.

so i was looking up obscure sound cards, i kind of got on that kick from... ah, i was talking to a friend about that ps2 soundtrack from the video game thread, anyway i was telling him about the adlib gold, which took me to this blog post, "the almost definitive pc sound card guide", which linked to this video promoting IBM's multimedia options (for only $6,000 or so in 1990 dollars you could have a machine that does multimedia almost as well as an amiga 500)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdMaIAjnoQI

and as i do when i see stuff like this, i clicked on their channel to see what else they have. which is why i'm now posting a video of desmond dekker's classic "israelites" being played back on a fisher price big bird record player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzegkQUuVWw

lots of good stuff on this channel, weird old stuff. "Here's a 1970's "Rotating Kaleidoscope" ballroom light set to the obscure "Around the World in 80 Seconds" by Nostromo from their 1979 disco version of the Alien movie soundtrack (!).", reads one video description. you can also see a souvenir video sold at weeki wachee amusement park in florida, "your video souvenir of the city of live mermaids!" and if you're wondering if "live mermaids" is a sexual fetish they make porn of now, why, yes. yes, it is.

Here is the description on an archive.org upload of an old cartoon:

This is a banned Talespin cartoon from my collection of banned and censored cartoons. When a group of people work to ban a certain media then part of their heritage is lost as a result. Many types of media I do not agree with, but I do not complain to have it banned. Remember the Soviet Union. They had to basically relearn their own history by going back to books written before the revolution. England knew nothing about their greatest heroes until the French occupation.

I was looking for episodes of the 1972 Henshin series "Thunder Mask". Not sure how that happened.

I also learned that Tom Terrific from an episode of the DCAU Justice League series had his design based on Captain Tootsie, a hero created by C.C. Beck to promote Tootsie Rolls:

https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Captain_Tootsie

He had a sidekick, a boy named Rollo, and two other young cohorts named Fatso and Fisty (the three of whom, along with the Captain himself, made up the Secret Legion).

Fatso and Fisty. That's how you sell Tootsie Rolls!

so i was looking up obscure sound cards, i kind of got on that kick from... ah, i was talking to a friend about that ps2 soundtrack from the video game thread, anyway i was telling him about the adlib gold, which took me to this blog post, "the almost definitive pc sound card guide", which linked to this video promoting IBM's multimedia options (for only $6,000 or so in 1990 dollars you could have a machine that does multimedia almost as well as an amiga 500)

Awesome. I really like Ben Eater's videos. http://www.youtube.com/@BenEater

i ran across a 150 minute fan edit of the original "ghostbusters" looking on archive.org for fanedits, i'm not sure why

oh i think i was maybe looking for space warriors 2000 or i was telling a friend about the fanedit "attack of the galactic monsters" or doing the "thunder mask" thing

anyway i ran across a guy who had some related stuff as well as more doctor who ephemera than i knew existed. vhs rips and, ok, some industrial videos the people who wound up making the "myth makers" series made in 1986 with jon pertwee doing the voiceover

during that same binge i found out that eight minutes of the 1953 "robin hood" series starring patrick troughton as doctor who existed and were on youtube

i also found out that the vhs edit of "the brain of morbius" was basically taken from a 1977 repeat edit, which will presumably be on the season 13 doctor who blu-ray

and a supercut of tobias vaughn yelling "PACKER!" because he's a trans man, i can only assume

and a really bad sixth-generation copy of a star trek parody

and a 1980 philadelphia kids' sci-fi tv show called "starstuff" where one of the kids could correspond through his computer...tv...thing with a girl in the distant future of 2010. i think she's in space. anyway somebody clearly watched carl sagan's "cosmos"

i was also reading the third issue of "nothing at the end of the lane" which mentioned that the recording of the doctor who episode "the reign of terror" was possibly filmed for use in a bbc2 play called "the day of ragnarok", which seems very interesting and experimental (it wound up not using doctor who footage at all). a restoration was shown at BFI southbank in 2017 but it's one of those things that seems unlikely to have an official release, more's the pity.

from the blog talking about the play's restoration, i got to a page detailing experimental television plays of the 1970s, including "rotten", described as "very much a product of its time":

https://forgottentelevisiondrama.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/rotten-2.jpg

based on this screenshot i can see where they're coming from. look at this! this looks magnificent! god, i'd love to be able to see this one.

anyway. clearly i'm in a rabbithole mood this week. did i even mention watching episode 77 of "mahoutsukai sally", with a young hayao miyazaki as the key animator, and finding it to be an incredible piece of storytelling, telling a creative, satisfying, and engaging story on an abysmal budget in an extremely short amount of time. i enjoyed it despite the fact that i don't understand japanese! eryncerise mentioned this in their video on mahoutsukai sally in their much-missed series "mahou profile: a history of magical girls" and i'm glad i followed the trail of breadcrumbs and watched it for myself. it's particularly impressive when you consider that anime from this period is generally... bad and incoherent.

also "señor 105"? the doctor who extended universe gets extremely silly

speaking of janky looking 1970s television

when i think of "1970s television" i think of "scanimate and atonal synth", and wow, does this one deliver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whsD_kI7laM

also here is a channel description from someone who had the entirety of the 2000 "lobo" animated web series on their channel:

"I don’t show obscure media to confuse my audience but to inform them."

i love that sentence. it speaks to me.

look at this shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slKMZgLKk4U-

i've run across that channel, but i never realized that those intros mostly came from the gilmore box channel! the compilation titles are probably more algo-friendly. i went and looked at the gilmore box channel and it's one of those fascinating channels that has a couple of very specific focuses - intros to obscure sitcoms (as the gilmore box "about page" says:)

ALL ITEMS POSTED FOR EDUCATIONAL & RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. ALL "KID FRIENDLY." Most pertain to my SINGLE SEASON SITCOM series of books. My newest is THERE ONCE WAS A SHOW FROM NANTUCKET (A COMPLETE GUIDE TO SITCOM "WINGS.")

...but also rare old doo-wop records. reminds me of the time i was looking at "sporadic e" tv recordings on youtube:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation

...and i found out that one of the people posting recordings was interested in E on more than just a _sporadic_ basis. it was really cool watching her transition videos. there are just so many of us who have these experiences and i'm always happy to see someone else who's had those positive experiences.

update: i somehow have gotten from that post to watching a man wearing a business suit and furry ears giving a presentation about the early days of Sonic the Hedgehog rom hacks at a retro gaming convention

i don't think i have ever seen a sonic the hedgehog fan wearing a business suit before. like, in my life.

Brimstead that TV intros vid is fascinating, thanks for sharing. I love when they give special status billing to actors I don't remember/have never heard of.

And Florence Stanley as Aunt Josephine.

ok look so i know i keep rabbitholing here. so this goes pretty far and it gets _very_ dark, cw for discussion of racism, sexual assault, schizophrenia. probably i'm just in a dark headspace...

i was looking for... to see if anybody had uploaded the credits of the tv show "convoy", which was the only fall 1965 show that that RwDt09 (that video right up above) didn't have opening credits for. because of the vagaries of how search is implemented, this brought me to a channel that uploaded copies of '70s british crime shows. callan, the hanged man, and... oh yes... season 2 of the xyy man. i've long found this show funny... i don't really know any xyy people but i know a fair number of xxy people... it's klinefelter's, i've heard it argued that it's an intersex condition. anyway, i don't know if xyy technically counts as "intersex" but it... doesn't... actually change anything significant, actually. it turns out there's actually a documented XYYYY syndrome, but there aren't a lot of people with _four_ y chromosomes so people can't say much about it. see most people who have chromosomes like xxy, xyy, don't ever really know it or think about it. anything outside the xx/xy binary is ignored although it's actually really common. same thing with, like, hypospadias, hypospadias isn't actually all that uncommon but usually what happens is that it's "surgically corrected", without the patient consenting and not even necessarily with the parents being informed or consenting, and people pretend that it didn't happen. there are all kinds of people who don't fit into the gender binary, but most of the time they're forced to act like they are. this doesn't necessarily work out to their benefit.

obviously this is a special interest of mine. i don't know a lot at all about genetics but i know that when people who _aren't_ experts talk about "the chromosomes" they're usually talking shit. i genuinely have no idea what my chromosomes are, and i have no interest in finding out. what does it matter? it doesn't matter. being diagnosed as intersex wouldn't really change my life, i don't think.

and it doesn't just happen with transphobes. the show depicts the main character as a _genetic criminal_. a, uh... superpredator, if you will. i can't help but notice that whenever someone starts saying that i'm a "genetic man" or whatever it's not too long before they start with the racist dogwhistles.

anyway, this trope also shows up in the pretty bad early '70s "ripped from the headlines" tv show "doomwatch" as well as the giallo film "il gatto a nove code", which at least has a fucking rad ennio morricone soundtrack.

i do want to get back to the xxy man, though, because one of the episodes they did was called "the detrimental robot". i haven't actually seen the episode in question, but the phrase rung a bell. it's one of those odd phrases that pops up. like "heroic doses". not the kinds of words you would string together randomly. in my case, i know it as a track on bob drake's album _medallion animal carpet_. great record. most of bob drake's records are. so here i am thinking that the track title is a reference to this episode. no, actually, it's not, it's... honestly i'm shocked that they would call an episode that, when i look into where it comes from. not shocked that bob drake would call a track that, just because he's into all that occult lovecraft shit, and a lot of that is racism-adjacent. i think he had a project called "vril", which i think is also a name that was used by some nazi band. vril is really popular with a certain sort of occult fash. to be totally clear i have no reason whatsoever to believe that bob drake himself is in any way shape or form endorsing racism by bringing up these esoteric subjects. there used to be nazi furries, i know, but i pretty unequivocally don't think bob drake is one of them himself. (oh if i hadn't mentioned it bob drake _is_ a furry... if you listen to any of his records, which you should do, you'll pick up on it pretty quickly).

so i search "detrimental robot" and i come up with a 1958 aircheck of the Long John Nebel show on WOR radio. Nebel was sort of, as best I can tell, the prototype for the Art Bell all-night Fortean thing, apparently took things in a different direction when TV took over the scripted shows that used to be on radio. one of the things that interests me is that i don't remember ever hearing about the dero (short for detrimental robot) conspiracy before. that's unusual... i could just have forgotten it but all those old conspiracy theories... i read through the entirety of "high weirdness by mail", but the whole dero thing seems to have been dead by the time that book was compiled, replaced with new forms of racist dog-whistles and just plain whistles.

that's one of the first things that becomes obvious when you start looking into conspiracy theories... damn near all of them are racist, either explicitly or implicitly. as far as i can tell the deros are only implicitly racist.

see, this gets back to the late 1940s and a guy named richard sharpe shaver. this is a guy who got the ear of the publisher of amazing stories, a guy named ray palmer...

so ok ray palmer is an interesting fellow in his own right, gardner fox named the secret identity of the silver age version of "the atom" superhero after palmer. palmer definitely went full occultist starting with the shaver thing... the FBI investigated him after he published an article in _Mystic_ magazine called "Venusians Walk Our Streets", which said that the FBI was investigating a mystery metal from venus. the fbi suspected that this was communist propaganda, since they were _not_ in fact researching a mystery metal from venus. he apologized and said that he was telling the CIA about the UFOs, at which point the FBI seems to have wisely decided to let the CIA have him.

palmer was also, later in life, obsessed with an esoteric religious work caled "oahspe: a new bible" by a 19th century american dentist. the dentist is credited by some as being the first person to use the word "star-ship". the british surrealist david gascoyne was a fan.

anyway the point is that ray palmer had been doing golden age sci-fi until he got into shaver in the mid '40s. i remembered dimly hearing something about this, but no, i was confusing him with john w. campbell, who only a few years later became a total simp for dianetics and turned _astounding_ into basically a shill mag for it. anyway, amazing stories basically did the same thing a couple years earlier except that he was taken by the work of shaver. shaver had a whole "hollow earth" thing, which at least in the 20th century was pretty strongly white supremacist. i know that an american vice president in the pre-civil war 19th century, richard mentor johnson, tried to fund an expedition to the center of the hollow earth. i don't know if it was specifically racist.

i mean to be fair i grew up reading "warlord" comics, which had a similar hollow earth setup. mostly it just reminded me of john norman's _gor_. and that's the other thing, right? you get into all this sadomasochist shit. like i'm _very_ pro-kink, this shit is different though. it's like that RPG stuff...

cause right the other place where the dEr0 (as they're termed in the RPG) show up is in a TTRPG thing called "veins of the earth" where they're presented as schizophrenic, and somehow i got from there to the rpghorrorstories reddit, which has a lot of TTRPG players who like to indulge in fantasies really similar to richard sharpe shaver's stuff. shaver was often alleged to be schizophrenic, and, i mean... one of the things i'm into is taking these things seriously, not as in "the dero and the tero really exist and they're inside the hollow earth", but as in "wow that's racist". like was francis e. dec mentally ill? yes! he was also very, very, very racist. and his mental illness doesn't excuse that.

see the thing about the deros is that they weren't actually robots, i don't know why he called them "detrimental robots" when they weren't robots. they were "mentally impaired sadists" who were "robot-like due to their savage behavior". maybe people thought differently about robots back then. i mean i think C3P0 would be offended. but coded racism, right? and a lot of it is descended from h.g. wells' "time machine", the tero corresponding to the eloi and the dero to the morlocks, except that the dero could create intrusive thoughts and cause people to hear voices and, i mean. yes. but the thing they seemed to do most was to engage in prolonged sadomasochistic torture and assault. there's a through-line that runs from there through john norman through every creepy DM on rpghorrorstories who thinks ... i mean, julian dibbell's account of the early '90s lambdamoo assault by a user calling himself "mr. bungle". it's not _new_, this sort of predatory behavior. not even remotely.

so basically even if you _were_ going to make a show like the "xyy man", which was a fundamentally bad idea in the first place, you definitely shouldn't make an episode based on richard sharpe shaver's idea of "detrimental robots".

i don't know i used to think like this all the time back in the '90s and i'm not really a fan of it. i'm pretty tired. i had a COVID booster yesterday and i'm worn out.

y'all

it's here

for the past several months i have been following the epic saga of the desert bus tool assisted speedrun (TAS)

someone wrote a bot that gets the game to its maximum score, which takes 33 days. i doubt any human has ever done it. the thing is that the standard procedure is to upload the videos of these TASes to Youtube. there was an absolutely epic, months-long argument over how to handle this TAS that resulted in at least one member being banned. people have _strong strong_ opinions about the ethics of the tool-assisted speedrun of Desert Bus

the ultimate conclusion seems to have been to only upload one eight-hour trip to youtube, given that, quoting Samsara, "a conservative estimate was that uploading the full run to YouTube in some way would take nearly two full months from a single Publisher", but a recording of the entire 33-day ordeal has been uploaded to archive.org. 171.4 GB. beautiful. absolutely beautiful.

Rabbit hole update! I've been following this site that posts news about old retro video games. A lot of it involves translations of Japan-only PS2 games. Since 2022, there's been an English-language patch available for the budget shooter "Maid Uniform and Machine Gun", described as "an action-shooter homage to the 1981 film Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, about a schoolgirl who inherits her father's Yakuza clan, and loosely following the same time-traveling plot as The Terminator 2: Judgement Day." It also describes the games as "outlandish" and "bizarre" but honestly, there's a pretty solid market for this kind of stuff. God knows I've seen enough meme art depicting a catgirl army in maid uniforms working together to... overthrow systemic oppression, typically. Not really too different from Dolemite's "all-girl army of kung fu killers", or the picture of "British soldiers (interrupted during drag show rehearsals by a German raid) manning a BL 6-inch Mk VII naval gun at Shornemead Fort, England in 1940".

That said, this probably isn't the majority of the appeal of this sort of art. Mostly it's otaku who like cute girls and like high-octane video game carnage and figure a combination of the two is a win-win. For these folks presumably that's genuinely all the appeal these games hold, and is nothing to do with gender dysphoria manifested as a deeply repressed desire for embodied female experience.

Anyway, the most recent fan translation is of the second game in the cult classic "Boku no Natsuyasumi" (which translates as "My Summer Vacation") series. It seems like kind of a video game version of Iyashikei, about which Wikipedia says:

Iyashikei originated in the late 1970s, but it emerged as a distinct subgenre in 1995, in the wake of the Great Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack. These traumatic events, combined with the economic recession, would lead to what scholar Paul Roquet calls the iyashi trend, or healing boom.[5] The trauma suffered by the Japanese public provided "the emotional context for the emergence of calm as a lucrative and marketable feeling."[5]

Personally I think Roquet is being a little too cynical about its marketability. My lived experience of reality is one in which everything is subservient to the market, whether one wishes or no.

I'm not actually sure if the game qualifies as Iyashikei... the Iyashikei I've seen (such as "Girls' Last Tour") have a strong sense of not just healing, but what is known in Brazil as _saudade_, and apparently "My Summer Vacation" to some extent embodies that feeling:

Ayabe initially conceived of Boku no Natsuyasumi as occurring in an intentionally vague time period, roughly between the late 1940s to the 1950s. As development progressed, he felt the game would be more relatable if it occurred in a specific era, and chose 1975 for the game's setting.[7] He chose August as the month to set the game in due to what he described as the month's sense of melancholy and "foreboding that summer will end after Obon", noting how that feeling of sadness "entered unconsciously" into the game's story, particularly its latter half.[7]

The Wikipedia article describes the feeling in Japanese terms as something called "mono no aware":

Mono no aware (物の哀れ), lit. 'the pathos of things', and also translated as 'an empathy toward things', or 'a sensitivity to ephemera', is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.[2]

"Mono no aware" is also the title of an ambient compilation album which features previously unreleased tracks by artists under the PAN label, including Yves Tumor and Jeff Witscher.

Jake Witz of NPR praised Yves Tumor's track "Limerence", calling it "a heartbreaking look at how mono no aware transpires within the context of a romantic relationship."[6] Witz commended the track's use of audio samples of romantic partners in a home video as "a haunting ceremony", and wrote that, "mono no aware is painful, but only if you see the past and present as disconnected worlds. By fusing decayed recordings with modern ambience, "Limerence" transforms death from a negative experience into a universal bond of empathy."[6]

This is the thing about rabbitholes, is that eventually one finds connections to things one didn't expect. Limerence is a concept that I've been hearing a lot about lately, with respect to polyamory and to borderline personality disorder. I keep forgetting what it means. I think it's a beautiful word. The album also sounds interesting - I'll probably give it a listen. I like the Yves Tumor I've heard.

---

Back to Boku no Natsuyasumi.

There's also some really good "unusual details in wikipedia articles" fodder here:

The cloud used on the box art for Boku no Natsuyasumi is also used on the cover of Everybody's Golf 3.[11]

One thing I didn't expect is that one of the key inspirations for this game was apparently... rave culture.

Ayabe is a techno and house music fan, and was regularly attending raves in remote locations such as mountains and beaches in the summer of 1997.

I also found someone going by the name "Action Button" doing a six hour review video of the game on Youtube.

The game is also apparently well-known within the "creepypasta" community for its "August 32nd" glitch:

"August 32nd" glitch

Subsequent to the release of Boku no Natsuyasumi, a glitch was discovered in the game wherein after certain inputs are made, the player will advance past the thirty-one in-game days of gameplay to "August 32nd" and beyond.[37] As no story events were programmed for these days, the game becomes increasingly unstable with various gameplay and visual bugs, such as objects with distorted textures and character models with missing limbs. The glitch gained a degree of infamy as a Japanese Internet meme, most notably as a video uploaded to the video-sharing site Niconico depicting footage of the glitch with horror film-inspired editing and music.[37] Ayabe has acknowledged the glitch in ambivalent terms and emphasized that its inclusion in the game was not intentional, but stated that because the glitch is merely trivial and not game-breaking, he feels a "tiny bit of pride" for its status as a subject of public curiosity.[11]

Honestly this sounds like pretty much perfect creepypasta, the sort of thing a lot of made-up creepypasta tries to emulate.

The game is based on a place called Tsukiyono. Wikipedia describes Tsukiyono as a "town and surrounding environs", but from what I can find it seems to more of a campground and isn't an actual town. Whatever the case, it's one of the more rural parts of Yamanashi Prefecture, which is itself one of the more bucolic areas of Japan and one of Japan's few landlocked prefectures (of special interest to me since I grew up in one of the two New Jersey counties that doesn't border another state or a body of water). Yamanishi prefecture has been a sister state/prefecture to Iowa since 1960, if that gives you any indication.

Mind you, given my special interests, the thing I gravitated to was Yamanashi Prefecture's two local television stations. One is UHF Television Yamanashi, broadcasting on Channel 37. At first I thought this was a rare global sighting of a station broadcasting on that channel. In the United States, the FCC has banned television stations from broadcasting on Channel 37 since 1963, due to the frequency band's importance to radio astronomy. Some other countries have also put the ban into place, but not Japan. After the end of analog, the UHF spectrum has been auctioned off, and no UHF spectrum above what was historically channel 36 is now used in the US. However, TV stations are now frequently assigned "virtual" channels, which don't necessarily bear any relation to the bandwidth they use. It's all very confusing and I don't understand it at all, honestly.

Anyway, regarding UHF Television Yamanashi, Wikipedia has this to say on its "Channel 37" page:

In Japan, UHF television channel frequencies are offset by one channel compared to North American channel naming convention. Japan's channel 36 is in use by TV Asahi in some regions.

In other words, outside of Japan the frequency UHF Television Yamanashi broadcast on during the analog days would have been known as channel 38.

The upshot here is that getting this information, and most importantly the kanji for these stations for Wikipedia, I was able to search Youtube and find the startup footage and local promos for some of these stations. This is a particular interest of mine, but I haven't gotten very far when it comes to Japanese stations. Or hadn't. Here, for instance, is an old promo, from the analog days, for UHF Television Yamanashi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnyWiBsHltU

Often clicking on the uploader will reveal other, similar videos uploaded by them. In this case, this is the lone video uploaded by this user, but when I looked for videos from the Yamanashi Broadcasting System, I found a channel with a whole bunch of local Japanese television startups from circa 1989-1990.

It's entirely possible that I might be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I'm not really sure, though.

Kate I seriously appreciated the Desert Run dispatch

thanks! :)

In the midst of World War III in 198X, the gods of our world, in actuality consciousness-based alien lifeforms, arrive on Earth in a spaceship from outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. The creatures fly to the Nazca Lines of Peru in which a dinosaur-shaped figure was newly discovered: Godzilla. The spaceship lets out a series of flashing lights, reviving the creature as a malevolent god of destruction. As the United Nations scrambles to prepare countermeasures against Godzilla, the gods send down a humanoid identifying himself as Jesus, who is both manipulating the monster and afflicting humanity with nightmares and hallucinations. The gods destroy the Earth's Van Allen radiation belts and send the world's cities into disarray using their spaceship, as Godzilla destroys coastal cities with tsunamis. An image of humanity's future is projected upon the skies above Giza, Egypt, depicting their horrifically mutated descendants. "Behold, your future!!," Jesus' voice booms, standing atop a pyramid. Godzilla crouches like a sphinx as Jesus ascends a stairway of light toward the heavens.[1][2]

The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons,
The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons,
The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons,
The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons,
The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons,

They should have revived the monkey.

They should have revived the monkey.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

Funny you should mention the monkey. There was something in the water in the late 1970s (wait, is cocaine water-soluble?). The so-called "Showa Era" of Godzilla films had ended after the poor box-office performance of 1975's "Terror of Mechagodzilla". Various attempts were made to revive it, but none saw fruition until 1984's "The Return of Godzilla", which kicked off the "Heisei" era of Godzilla films. Naming conventions for different eras of Godzilla films are kind of confusing. "The Return of Godzilla" was actually released, like its predecessors, in the Showa Era, but since it established a new continuity, one that was continued by other films which were released in the Heisei Era, it's referred to as a Heisei Era film.

The film was released in the US in a... heavily modified form as "Godzilla 1985". They even brought back Raymond Burr to play Steve Martin. I was nine years old when I saw the film in theaters. I didn't know or care who Raymond Burr was. I do remember, however, the incessant product placement for a particular soft drink. I cannot, however, remember exactly _which_ soft drink the film promoted. It might have been Tab. It probably wasn't Tab Clear.

Oh, wait, I trailed off there. Anyway! Before "God's Godzilla", the plot summary of which I posted above, there was a proposal for a revival of the Godzilla series called "A Space Godzilla" (no relation to the eventual Space Godzilla character in the Heisei era) eventually published in Starlog. This was a concept for the series revival by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who had just directed the renowned Japanese cult horror film "Hausu". In this film, Godzilla washes up on the shores of Japan, dying of diabetes. Scientists determine that Godzilla is not named Godzilla at all, but it a pregnant alien named Rozan from the planet Godzilla. The scientists turn her into a rocket to send her back to her home planet, where she is reunited with her husband and there is a battle with evil humanoid aliens. The film went unproduced for unspecified reasons.

Anyway, the film's proposal listed proposed staff, which overlap almost exactly with the staff of "Hausu", including having a soundtrack by GODEIGO. GODEIGO did the soundtrack to Hausu, but are probably best known in the West for the song "Monkey Magic", the theme song to the 1970s TV series "Monkey", and often known as "Monkey Magic". "Monkey Magic" was actually a later TV cartoon with a theme song by Tommy Marolda - which is itself extremely good, but less-remembered than GODEIGO's song. Understandable, as "Monkey" was exponentially more popular than "Monkey Magic".

All of which reminds me, since "Monkey" is one of the many, many works based on "Journey to the West", that I've been meaning to watch the 2021 Chinese film by that title (lit. 'Universe Exploration Editorial Department', per Wikipedia), which isn't actually a adaptation of that story but is a postmodern low-budget film which has a strong cult following.

While I was reading about this I came across the Heisei-era merch line aimed for a sort of Sanrio audience, Godzilland. This merch line created adorable chibi versions of the Godzilla kaiju. There were also a couple educational OVAs for children, much of which has been fansubbed, and a quiz show made to promote 1993's "Godzilla vs. Megagodzilla II", of which only the first episode, unsubbed, circulates. The newscast (or perhaps film review panel?) featuring Godzilla and Mechagodzilla as the anchors has become a minor internet meme. Here's the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK5o8vyVnU4

There is actually a fan tumblr for Godzilland which seems to be active, having recently posted fan art created for "Mothra-Sonic", a version of Sonic the Hedgehog reincarnated as the Godzilland Mothra. I am not sure I will ever understand Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.

There were several Japanese video games utilizing the Godzilland aesthetic. Another game from the era featuring Godzilla was Epyx's 1986 "Movie Monster Game" for the Apple II and Commodore 64. Epyx managed to officially license Godzilla for the game, but the other monsters were Suspiciously Similar Substitutes, including Mister Meringue for the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (Relationships: Infant cream puff offspring, four words I never thought I would see together). This is not to be confused with "Mister Merengue", who made this video, which seems to not be terribly popular:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj8mK67RC4I

There is another, more popular Mister Merengue on Youtube who does videos about the association football team Real Madrid. I think.

I played the "Movie Monster Game" at the house of a friend who had a C64. I thought it would be a fun game like Rampage (which did not license Godzilla, but uses a Mister Merengue-style Godzilla substitute known as "Lizzie".) It was not.

---

Obviously, sometimes my rabbitholing takes a while to peter out, and it can wind up going in multiple directions. I wound up explaining "My Summer Vacation" and the concepts of "mono no aware" and "saudade" to my co-workers. For the latter, I of course came back to Tom Jobim's "Chega de Saudade"... when I was looking up the song I happened to notice that Jobim named as one of his biggest influences was a man named Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, the man who brought twelve-ton (you know what I'm leaving that typo) music to Brazil. This is one of his works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_vpIlLMQDY

It looks like the Instituto Piano Brasileiro site has a lot of really cool Brazilian piano stuff on there. Looking at their most popular videos, one of them is by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk I know because Van Dyke Parks has long championed him as a 19th century United States composer. Which he was - born in New Orleans - but he was also very much an internationalist, and reading about him Brasil perhaps has as much claim to call him one of theirs as America does. Gottschalk left the United States after being accused of having an affair with a schoolgirl and spent the rest of his life in South America, dying in Brazil four years later.

I love doing this nerd shit. This is probably my actual hobby.

a Mister Merengue-style Godzilla substitute known as "Lizzie".

Fuck, see, I did it. I called "Mister Meringue" "Mister Merengue", despite explicitly saying to not confused the two. I always get those two mixed up.

The kaiju film that made by far the biggest impression on me as a youngster was The War of the Gargantuas, which I learned only relatively recently was called Frankenstein's Monsters in the original Japanese and was a sequel to Frankenstein vs. Baragon. At the age of--five? six?--I had no real interest in or ability to follow much of the plot, but the spectacle of the green Gargantua eating a woman and spitting out her clothes has stayed with me for more than 50 years.

The plot of Frankenstein vs. Baragon is both completely bonkers and a poignant reflection of the anxieties of post-war Japan:

During World War II in Nazi Germany, Nazi officers confiscate the living heart of the Frankenstein Monster from Dr. Riesendorf and pass it on to the Imperial Japanese Navy, who take it to a research facility in Hiroshima for further experimentation. As the experiments begin, Hiroshima is destroyed by the Americans using a nuclear bomb dropped by Enola Gay. Fifteen years later, Hiroshima has been rapidly rebuilt. A feral boy runs rampant through the streets, catching and devouring small animals. This comes to the attention of American scientist Dr. James Bowen and his assistants Drs. Sueko Togami and Ken'ichiro Kawaji. A year later, they find the boy hiding in a cave on a beach, cornered by outraged villagers. Bowen and his team take care of the boy and discover that he is building a strong resistance to radiation.

I do miss the days of the drive-in.

Oh, I do love those old Kaiju films. "Frankenstein vs. Baragon" (which I knew in its AIP dub as "Frankenstein Conquers the World") and "War of the Gargantuas" were two of my faves... those things reran all the time on independent TV and, later, early cable... TBS or TNT or something had those marathons of old kaiju films. There were some good ones you don't see as much. There's a film called "King Kong Returns" in which King Kong fights an evil mad scientist named... Dr. Who! It was based on a cartoon series, I think, which was dubbed into English I think and shown in the US, but I never saw it.

I don't want to get too pretentious about it, but it's really fascinating to see how the trauma of WWII affected those who lived through it. I saw this one fansubbed episode of the original 1968 version of Cyborg 009, a pretty well-known media property there. (Note that the character design includes some pretty awful racial caricatures. I have to assume that more recent versions tone down those aspects.) Anyway, this episode was called "Ghosts of the Pacific" and involves the ghosts of the imperial Japanese navy attacking Pearl Harbor _again_, with the irradiated Yamato (which in this telling was apparently sunk in an American atomic bomb test) coming back to attack California. It's just really interesting to see the lens through which the war was viewed. The episode is driven by this twin horror of the actions of Imperial Japan and the American use of the atomic bomb against them.

There's just stuff in animation of that era... take, for instance, Osamu Tezuka's "Tales of the Street Corner", premiered on the same day as the first episode of "Astro Boy". To me, it speaks to a lived experience that I just don't have. Americans who lived through World War II, it's hard for me to imagine any of them having Tezuka's perspective. I don't get the sense that Japanese political leadership today has that sort of perspective. Trauma like that... it maybe changes form, changes how it manifests, over generations, over 50 years or more.

Or maybe there's just this tension in anime. I think maybe I've talked about this before, but I feel that people like Tezuka and Miyazaki, they just don't represent the same sort of values as, I guess, anime for people who like anime does. For me this is most obvious in the way Miyazaki doesn't sexualize or sexually exploit his female protagonists. This is very much in opposition to the approach taken by, for instance, Go Nagai. Or, you know. Women in maid outfits with machine guns. People like me aren't _supposed_ to be the target audience for that sort of thing. I think there are a lot of people in the exploitation racket who don't understand quite what they're doing or why.

Anyway, there's this distinctly Japanese apocalyptic flavor to a lot of '60s and '70s stuff. "God's Godzilla", it's audacious, but it also didn't really come out of nowhere. America had the Irwin Allen disaster films like "The Towering Inferno" (I played a 2600 game of the same name, but didn't really understand the cultural reference), but Japan had "Japan Sinks", followed by "The Prophecies of Nostradamus" in 1974. The US dub got fucked around with to try and exploit "The Late Great Planet Earth" thing - and there are similarities, but it's not at all the same sort of eschatology. Anyway, Prophecies of Nostradamus, Wikipedia says, "is infamous for its depiction of mutated human beings." This was an extremely sensitive topic in Japan due to the "hibakusha", the victims of the atomic bombs, who were heavily ostracized and discriminated against. An Ultraseven episode with a monster who strongly resembled the hibakusha, including keloid scars, has been banned from rebroadcast for a very long time, although a US dub of it has been shown and does circulate. Similarly, "Prophecies of Nostradamus"' depiction of mutated human beings is cut from official copies, and circulates only on low-quality bootleg DVD.

All of the stuff about Jesus as an evil alien controlling Godzilla, though, that's original. That's _really_ original, if you ask me, I mean, wow.

-

The other trail I've been following is translations of old Japanese video games, and I ran across translation of a game by a guy named Kenji Eno. I was sure the game was made up, the man was made up, the interview was made up... news of this translation came out on April 1, and here was a repost of an interview Eno gave with a now "long-defunct" gaming website, also from April 1, and...

the game translated is a game called Oyaji Hunter Mahjong, where instead of getting the girls to get naked (a staple of Mahjong video games) instead you're using Mahjong to beat up creepy old dudes (called "Oyaji" in Japan) who are trying to creep on young anime girls. This guy also made a horror game and got _Michael Nyman_ to do the soundtrack, made another game where the entire visuals were a blank screen and there was nothing but sound, which he called a "funky game". also a funky game - no, _the funkiest_ game - was a minigame collection for the 3DO that came packaged with a free condom. he hand-numbered every one of the limited edition of 10,000 copies, which leads him to say:

KE: I'm depressed right now because I don't usually go back and think about my past, and we're digging it all up now, and I'm kind of thinking, "Hmm, very interesting."

1UP: Yeah, going over your life right now, I feel like I've done nothing with mine.

KE: Oh, no -- you'll find out about it. The next issue of 1UP will be a homepage! It's a secret...a secret like a beautiful ingredient. The text will be a sex FAQ. The homepage will be a sex FAQ. Kill the Bush! 9/11 was engineered by America, not al-Qaeda!

ok, so it turns out this guy is real and i just never heard of him, and i mean i guess he's not any weirder than Suda51 and the infamous ending he put into the story mode of 1994's super famicom game "Super Fire Prowrestling Special":

The hero encounters Akira Maeda's fictional sister and falls in love with her, but she spurns his romantic intents, causing him to fall into a deep depression. To make matters worse, just before his championship match, he watches as his American trainer is killed right before his eyes. Even after becoming the undisputed pro wrestling champion of the world, it's a hollow victory without anyone to share it with. Deciding that everything was all a waste of time, he commits suicide.

i mean, yeah. there were some weird video game makers. and it makes sense that people have forgotten kenji eno because most of the stuff he did heavily involved FMV, and FMV games just aren't fun. STILL.

y'all it's these fan edits

sure, there's the big-name ones, "the thief and the cobbler", of course, the twelve thousand edits of the star wars films and all the people trying to figure out if they can fix "the hobbit" in post

but then you got stuff like steven soderbergh taking "raiders of the lost ark" and making it black and white and replacing the soundtrack with nine inch nails songs

i mean he's fine as a director but he's out of his element when it comes to shitposts. it's just nowhere in the same _league_ as "you've got nails"

then he's got one where he runs "the killers" (1946) and "the killers" (1964) side by side

like he's fuckin' _warhol_ or something

i appreciate his enthusiasm but has he made a comprehensive attempt to make "howard the duck" (1986) a watchable film? no. _somebody_ has. have they succeeded? haven't the foggiest. it's 14 fucking gigs. how am i supposed to download a 14 gig file from a site that limits users to 5 gb a day?

i'm just saying, the "reconsecrated cut" of the 1980 william peter blatty film "the ninth configuration" is _way_ more accessible. i was able to grab that no problem. the poor person who made it is, i think, a little frustrated at the lack of feedback they're getting to their fanedit. i've been there. i mean, not there specifically, i've never done a fan edit of "the ninth configuration", but i've put a lot of work into things with a similarly niche appeal. anyway, i want to put it on the record that _i_ appreciate the hell out of it. even though it's been long enough ago since i saw the original that i can't recall the differences.

you know the only reason i saw the original in the first place? because man or astroman did a track that sampled it on their _deluxe men in space_ ep. the only reason. i wasn't sure what the hell it was going to be, but it wasn't what i expected.

there seems to be more of a following for "groucho marxist", an edit of _joker_ that cuts out all of the muddled bullshit and makes it a (short) film explicitly about class struggle. there's also "fear and loathing in the star wars holiday special", which kind of straddles the line between a "fan edit" and "the star wars holiday special out of context". of course in this case it makes as much damn sense in context. i mean no actually it makes less sense in context. you could say the same for the 20 minute edit of, well, most of the filmography of edward d. wood, jr.

while we're talking about fan edits of the films of gender non-conforming people, i'm utterly _delighted_ to see that there's a fan edit of _speed racer_ now... when i watched it recently i thought there was so much that was amazing about it, but it, uh, had some problems with consistency and pacing. reading on fanedit about the editor's approach, i feel like it meshes pretty well with my feelings about the film:

I believe that this film, like anything written from the heart, is a bit autobiographical. (Just take Mom's speech at the midpoint and replace "Races" with "Movies" for example.) Whether subconsciously or not, I feel that the sibling relationships between Rex, Speed, and Spritle may have been inspired at some point by that of Lily & Lana Wachowski. However, taking the young characters' actions and boiling them down to "Kids doing funny things" kind of hides that, but when we take those scenes away we see how much heart really lies within these characters.

honestly that's kind of the feeling i got from the film too. i'm looking forward to seeing what they (no idea what pronouns they use) did with it!

i have of course been on a bit of a kaiju kick here, and there are some kaiju edits ... godzilla vs. gigan without the stock footage, for instance. hell if i know. it's not a movie i know by heart. Pacific Rim minus the subplot. I saw it in the theater, in 3D, but mostly I remember it being very dark and confusing to watch. I don't remember the subplot. Maybe my brain has worked out how to parse the film now, tho. and finally, "HP Lovecraft's Rodan" - a simple concept - cut the film after Rodan's first appearance. they also make it silent.

that's a whole subset of fan edits - make it silent, no dialogue. i guess there's a little of that in soderbergh's _raiders_, but this stuff is aiming for something different. batman as a silent film. a shame to lose michael keaton's voice acting, mind, but nicholson's... broad... performance as the joker might possibly be more suited to silent performance than sound. for sure, the use of music to place more emphasis on the emotions than on the dialogue works... works really well with burton's directorial approach, honestly. maybe all of burton's films should be silent films!

other silent edits don't hew so closely to the pre-sound silent aesthetic. the approach here is more that of taking visually impressive but narratively underwhelming films and stripping out any part of the narrative that distracts from the visual element. i'm a big fan of this approach. there's a 50 minute edit of the aeon flux film which is nice enough, i suppose, but the real winner here is the half hour edit of david lynch's _dune_. it's an absolutely visually astounding film, and it's an absolute pleasure to be able to take in the visuals without getting distracted by the need to _explain_ things. if i'd recommend any particular one of these fan edits, it would be the _dune_ edit.

at least until i figure out how to download this 14 GB "howard the duck" fan edit.

the most bottom of the barrel 70s and 80s kids shows was the filmation stuff

i mean if you weren't good enough for hanna barbera - i know people love hanna barbera, but i grew up on hanna barbera cartoons and they were shit. absolute dogshit. scooby doo? terrible cartoon. absolutely awful. and i'm not talking the scrappy doo stuff, i'm talking the original '69-'70 series. it was bad. i'm not a furry, so i was never into the Disney Afternoon stuff stylistically, but in terms of quality? absolute leagues better than hanna barbera.

filmation was just the worst of the worst. yes, star trek: tas had some quality stories, but far more typical was stuff like "gilligan's planet" and what we as kids knew as "fake ghostbusters".

fake ghostbusters was based on one of their terrible live-action series... these were even worse than the cartoons. there was Space Academy, with Jonathan Harris, and then they did a follow-up series where they COULDN'T EVEN GET JONATHAN HARRIS so they put in james doohan, standing in front of a bluescreen for ten minutes to phone in his lines for the series. and then there was the one with charles nelson reilly playing a crocodile hosting kids' cartoons. i guess the schtick was supposed to be sort of a proto-krusty-the-clown thing but charles nelson reilly is no krusty the clown. hell, he's not even a sideshow mel.

like here's the thing, whenever i click on a channel to get the intros of these shows, whoever's uploading them has also uploaded camcorder vids from CBGBs of punk bands nobody has ever heard of. i live for this shit, personally. it's just one of those weird intersections. honestly sometimes i'm not sure why i _didn't_ have a punk band in the '90s.

this one's different, i guess because they're uploading british stuff like "fingerbobs" instead they have a rip of some old '80s acid house video with samples of someone saying "hitler is dead". before james brown was dead, i guess hitler was dead. idk, maybe this shit was famous in the acid house scene, fuckin' hitler acid house. i'm american, i don't fuckin' know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzjBhNQEo_I

i'm not aware of there being an "acid dictators volume 2" for the record.

it's been a while! ran across this delightful bit of children's tv hell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAuE3YLEbCY

god damn, this is more krusty the klown than krusty the klown. watch as a children's show host makes a racist comment live on air! ironically enough he would go on to voice moe and mr. burns... but not krusty.

says the description:

September 1989 clips of the costumed King Koopa hosting Kool Kartoons and giving away prizes on the original Fox Kids Club. Koopa is of course a character in the Mario games, whose cartoon voice was later supplied by actors like Jack Black and Harvey Atkin. Spun off from the Super Mario Bros Super Show, King Koopa's Kool Kartoons was only broadcast on one Los Angeles TV station, and only for a few months in 1989. Koopa was played by two actors, starting with the one seen here, Chris Latta, the voice of Cobra Commander in the G.I. Joe animated series, Starscream in the first Transformers cartoons, and season one of the Simpsons featured him voicing Moe Szyslak and Mr. Burns. According to Wikipedia, "Partway through the series' production, Chris Latta was fired and replaced after a string of incidents occurred, including an altercation where Latta's own son was among the child audience." Latta is certainly offbeat here, heard at one point muttering to someone (presumably a child, but perhaps a stage hand) "What're you from Biafra?" We have NO IDEA what that was about, but it could certainly be taken a number of ways, most of them, um, troublesome....

EDIT: A post appeared online after we shared this link, from someone who says they worked on the show and remembers the "What're you from Biafra?" comment - according to the post, "There was an episode where he said he wanted kisses from his fans, and we dropped Hershey kisses on him. The audience, who was mostly African-American that day, stormed the stage. He fended them off with his scepter and said, live on TV, no delay, 'What're you from Biafra?'"

Anyway, despite a replacement host, the show was cancelled after the president of Disney, Michael Eisner allegedly told the head of 20th Century Fox that it "undermined the morals of its live, youthful audiences." The program, widely considered "lost media" (until BetaGems came along!), only ran from September to November, 1989. The BetaGems channel also has "10-16-89 King Koopa's Kool Kartoons, MORE longlost Mario Bros show!," "10-16-89 Super Mario Bros Super Show complete closing credits song," "1989 USA Cartoon Express & Nickelodeon Cartoons TV ad," "1989 Secret Saturday Cartoon Show, Karate Kid & Camp Candy," and "Cartoon Lost & Found: Adam West October 1989 pilot, complete show."

Koopa is Billy Corgan and I claim my $5 prize

I'm rabbitholding a lot, is the thing. Jean Shepherd. Someone named Gazely Gaze who has some "new wave" and deep prog stuff. Mr J Wilson, who I've grabbed before, who has a lot of fan mixes of Beach Boys and fusion-era Miles songs. A mixtape by Eris Drew (linked on ILX). Hugo Faces, who has a lot of New York/New Jersey '80s ads... "Nobody Beats The Wiz!", which I forgot about until now. Circunferencia Punga, who has some radical Chilean stuff, lots of that. And today, I was reading about... it's the rabbithole, right? Somebody talks about "Post-Punk" video games, which apparently is Pizza Tower? I don't know if I get that. Which leads me to thinking about "New Wave" science fiction vs. "New Wave" music, leads me to question my assumption that they had nothing to do with each other... The Normal and Joy Division were both explicitly influenced by Ballard... and then there's the whole thing about Moorcock and Zelazny being "new wave", which Zelazny at least was... I think I have a copy of that book, the Buddhist one they were going to make that movie out of as part of the "Canadian Caper" with Kirby art. Like a retelling of the Bhagavad-Gita as sci-fi or something? Never read it. Might have lost it in the move.

Anyway it brings me back to... Disch, who denied connections to the "new wave", is the one who clicks most with me. Merril I mostly know from her, uh, introductions to the Canadian Dr. Who broadcasts in the '70s, when she called herself the "Un-Doctor", before she was replaced by Jim Dator. Delany, though. I want to read more Delany. I know I take things personally that aren't, but I feel like Dhalgren reflects something of how I understand my life, to the extent that I understand it, which I don't. And Babel-17... I used to be skeptical of Sapir-Whorf, before I realized how much it had affected me personally, how much my life has changed now that I know the word "transgender". And how much there is in my life I still don't have words for, that there _should_ be words to describe but aren't. Anyway, I was reading Delany's Wikipedia novel and my God this guy is interesting. I didn't know he made a film, and Jonas Mekas' brother was involved. And the way Steinem and Delany accidentally sort of shot each other in the foot over Wonder Woman. I need to read more Le Guin and I need to read more Jemisin, though nobody's mentioned Jemisin in a couple of years now, but I _really_ need to read more Delany. Anyway looking up The Orchid brought me to a channel with lots of videos of James Baldwin and Kwame Ture and people I should probably know more about.

there are three japanese films forming the tripartite standard by which all other bad japanese films are judged:

lake of illusions (1982)
siberian express (1996)
peking man (1997)

hoshi wo miro hito is known in japan as "densetsu no kusoge", meaning "legendary kusoge" (i mean i guess we can further translate "kusoge" as "shit game"... god i'm getting old, there's a meme about a fansub which gratuitously uses a japanese word with a simple english translation, and then puts a footnote in translating that word... anybody remember what i'm talking about?)

i find these stanzas by robert burns about fucking to be genuinely beautiful:

John Anderson my jo, John,
You can f—k where’er you please,
Either in our warm bed,
or else aboon the claise;
Or you shall have the horns, John,
Upon your head to grow;
That is a cuckold’s malison,
John Anderson my jo.

So when you want to f—k, John,
See that you do your best,
When you begin to sh—g me,
See that you grip me fast;
See that you grip me fast, John,
Until that I cry Oh!
Your back shall crack, e’er I cry slack,
John Anderson my jo.

-

25 episodes of the mediocre 1971 japanese anime documentary on the pacific war, "animentary: decision", are fairly widely available on the net, including with fansubs. however, the 26th episode, "Kawakami's Decision", barely exists anywhere, per the commentary of a fansub group working on translating it:

"For a variety of unknown reasons, collectively referred to with an umbrella term of “production issues,” episode 26 is an entirely irrelevant interview with Tetsuji Kawakami, the manager of the Yomiuri Giants of the Central League of professional baseball. It has nothing to do with the war, has no animation whatsoever and was apparenly shoehorned into the show under the pretext of his manager’s position also warranting a lot of decision-making."

tell me about your jean shepard rabbit hole, rushomancy

tell me about your jean shepard rabbit hole, rushomancy

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

god, hell if i can remember any of it now haha

it's been a weird week and i was looking at my most recent downloads folder... i download a lot of stuff from youtube because everything is ephemeral. including my downloads, mind you, but i'm from that generation where i don't trust the cloud. someday someone's gonna shoot an orgone cannon at it and bust it. that's why the payment processors keep cracking down on "adult" and "fetish" content, i bet.

sorry. it's been a weird week.

i get into, like. vibes, liminality, nostalgia a lot. maybe it's serendipity and maybe it's subconscious, but the "cloudbusting" video is a perfect encapsulation of my vibe. not _just_ the video itself. what the (flying erase) heads used to call "set and setting". it's specifically being home sick from work when i was ten or eleven and seeing the video on MTV and not being sure whether or not it was real. kate bush wasn't popular in the US like she was in the UK... maybe it was '87, maybe it was because she was on "don't give up".

the whole liminality, creepypasta thing to me goes back to the "scary logos" fad back in the day, the WGBH logo by gershon kingsley scared so many kids, or what they called the "v of doom". (i was looking up the logo on youtube, WGBH has a nice youtube channel except they just call themselves "GBH", which makes me think of these folks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07jwCpwRWos

so of course i look at what else is on anachronistic anarchist's channel and it's ads for the ford cortina and danish bacon and it's like... me too, anachronistic anarchist. i too am an anarchist who likes first-wave hardcore punk and 1970s adverts. i mean there's something satisfying about seeing the anarchy symbol in on ad for PAL dog food.

sorry, i know this is a rabbithole thread, but i want to get back to the point i was trying to make

there's all sorts of versions of liminality and i found this channel, which is the version that clicks with me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=community

to me a central feature of liminality is _ambivalence_. a lot of this stuff, this backrooms stuff, tips over the line for me into horror, into jumpscares. and for me it's this sense of dread, of anticipation, of something that _could_ happen, that sometimes _does_ happen, but mostly doesn't. what if my mom's in a "bad mood"? what if someone comes home unexpectedly while i'm wearing a dress? what if someone _notices_ me? the fear of being perceived. the observer, terrified of being observed... not a _voyeur_, someone who belongs there but feels like she doesn't.

something is _wrong_ and i can't quite put my finger on what it is. everybody else says that there's nothing wrong. that it's just me who's wrong.

for whoever runs pics n portraits... it's talking about something they weren't there for. it's the _idea_ of the past, and not the experience. for me, though... for a lot of it i _was_ there, it _was_ my experience. and when i look at stuff i'm trying to recapture, to convey, the sense of _wrongness_ i felt, that other people seemed to not see, not notice. recontextualization. that's how i look at things. constructing a version of the '80s where matia bazar and alaska belong right next to kate bush.

because the reality doesn't match the myth. it doesn't hold up removed from the context. watching old episodes of "night flight"... like, you can get some idea of what's going to happen next. what's important for me is the _uncertainty_. the "what the fuck is this" moments. watching "sesame street" and suddenly there's this philip glass thing with circles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-op5kqeoEc

and i mean i'm _six_, you know? or watching, like, not just the famous HBO intro animation, but the promos in between them for, i don't know, "meatballs ii" or something. browsing through cable and there's a documentary about ants and on TLC they're just straight up showing detailed eye surgery, turning on the public information channel and they're showing an ad for an internet service provider where the soundtrack is literally just the whine of a modem connecting. my dad's watching his favorite news program on pbs and here at 8:07 is the intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP5NraxJsoA

and i would always get _so excited_ when this fucking terry riley shit would come on and then there would be some boring guy talking about tip o'neill for half an hour

this person's vision of sleepcore is explicitly _anti_-nostalgia, _anti_ "weren't things better back in the old days", because i was there, and they weren't. things are shitty now in ways they weren't before but the past _sucked_. the media of my youth is bill cosby ads and people making fun of boys in dresses. i thought it was ok, i thought it was normal, and it wasn't. at all.

because the other thing that has to come across is that it was also kind of _cool_. i wasn't _scared_ by scanimate logos. i thought they were rad. even the boring stuff... like there was doctor who, a lot of which was boring, what kept me going a lot of the time was they'd break at 10:00 and draw the new jersey lottery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWyjz9xhzbU

also, what the fuck is with this dude's camera, it's all cams of this lady hela young, half of which the uploader has flagged as "adult content"? like this is the contemporary equivalent, this dude makes me _very uneasy_.

but then you go from there to this and it's like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videos

i mean a lot of it does have the watermark where i's from the walter brown media archives, but there's _so much_ there. and hezakya is curating all of this stuff, _that's_ the value of this.

i mean to me this belongs just as much in any kind of "sleepcore" mix as anything. it's not all hazy vibes, it's also, like, "1980 NYC ROLLER DANCING MOVIE"

idk, this is a rabbithole, sometimes they don't go anywhere but down, you know?

-

i guess i might as well share this, it's a playlist i put together for a film night for friends that i haven't actually gotten the spoons to organize yet. but the playlist is fire.

JOIX-TV - 1991-06-15 YTV sign-on
King Kong Escapes - 1968 US theatrical trailer
Submersion of Japan - 1973 Japan theatrical trailer (unsubbed)
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis - trailer for 1988 Akio Jissoji film (unsubbed)
Top Knot Detective - trailer for 2017 Australian "mockumentary"
Blue Christmas - unsubbed Japan theatrical trailer for 1978 Kihachi Okamoto film
Sony SL-8500 Betamax - unsubbed 1978 Japanese ad
Dream Creation - 2023 Mike Dent supercut of 1980s Japanese toy commercials
Pioneer - unsubbed 1985 H.R. Giger ad (using some of his designs for Jodorowsky's Dune)
Star Luster commercial - unsubbed 1985 30s ad for Namcot Famicom game
Taito Games commercial - subbed 1985 30s ad
Mario Kart 64 - subbed 1996 animated ad
Come to the Ocean - unsubbed 1984 Koji Nanke animation for TV show Minna no Uta
Alice in Wonderland - unfinished (voiceless) pilot for late '60s/early '70s? anime
I Am Your Tears - unsubbed 1998 Koji Nanke animation
JOPX-TV - 1990s FTV sign-on
P-Man Pilot - subbed pilot for 1996 independent tokusatsu series
The Master of Shiatsu - 1989 dialogue-free film by Gakuryu Ishii
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 - renowned 1972 women-in-prison film, subbed
Bukyo Sentai Buddhaman - subbed 1986 independent tokusatsu film

lol i forgot playlist embeds don't work here, sorry

My latest binge has been public access television. Part of the whole "sleepcore" thing. Kind of the... the feeders into wider public access awareness... there's BlameItOnJorge, whose videos I don't like. He pads his videos and he's overly sensationalist. In a broader sense there's Tim and Eric, whose work I respect but who are more into the Wesley Willis end of things. or, like. the found footage festival, i went to one of their shows once, in indiana, long ago. i think they're aligned with tim & eric. They sincerely support the weirdos, but as I age I'm starting to kind of navigate the line between "weirdos" and "oddballs".

The Algorithm(TM) recommended me this video that's kind of in the "iceberg" format. It's a format that's been popular for a number of years - it's a tier list that sorts (incompletely) works in a certain category by obscurity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igZ7C4O4Km8

i really have liked watching joey engelman's work. i'm only about halfway through. it's a dense video and when i watch something, i watch critically. i take copious notes. and i do my own research based on what's in the video. there's a lot of interesting-looking long videos that i don't get to, because i do watch in-depth and i only have so many hours in the day. engelman only has a few, i don't know how much i'll get to here.

"iceberg" videos can be of varying quality. engelman talks about his approach... a lot of people who make "iceberg" videos don't have skin in the game. they're trying to make sense out of someone else's work. to me there's something interesting about that, but i do prefer engelman's approach. he's basing his video off someone else's iceberg chart, but he's not taking it as given. he's adding his own things. this video is honestly the most in-depth look at public access culture in america that i've ever seen. i love this. it's something i've wanted to know more about, something that fascinates me, something that inspires a lot of my own thoughts.

what hit me was when engelman got to glendora. again, you can kind of trace vectors here... public access shows don't reach broader public perception out of nowhere. in glendora's case, she was on letterman.

i'd forgotten, really, what "late night" was like, what letterman was like, before carson retired. he became so _respectable_ that i forgot the strangeness of the '80s show. and it's not... it's not like letterman was being _inauthentic_ on the late show. it's just the format, you know, he did things differently for a different audience. that's normal.

in some ways, though, i think "late night with david letterman" is the real spirit of what "sleepcore" means to me. it's finding wonder in the mundane. letterman just has this goofy hoosier charm. hoosiers aren't like that today, aren't charming like that. he did these weather reports and he was on these gameshow pilots as a contestant and there's this wide-eyed wonder to him that's just, i think, gone from the midwest. it's not there anymore. i guess the cruelty was always there, but lately it seems to have driven out everything else. there are people who aren't cruel in the midwest. i know some of them. they're invisible to most people.

glendora is someone who, you know, she's got thousands of old archive videos on her youtube channel. few of them have more than about a dozen views. she's putting stuff out for a public even though she doesn't have a faithful audience. people don't _watch_ her stuff. it's not something you i could ever imagine watching super-critically, paying attention to. that's what i love about it, that sense of ephemerality. some of the public access shows, i am a packrat, i do make copies for my personal files. mystic kids funtime, sure, i can do that, i can do that. glendora? i wouldn't dream of it. she reminds me of my grandmother. a little more eccentric than my grandmother. glendora seems to file a lot of weird lawsuits, and i don't know why. i don't judge. anyway there aren't, you know, there aren't a lot of people out there like my grandmother anymore. that's probably a good thing. my grandmother was homophobic, my grandmother was racist, my grandmother would have disowned me if i'd come out to her (of course, so would basically everyone else i knew, back then). and i don't know if glendora is or not. her show kind of... evokes the complicated feelings i have about my past.

there are these different tracks people were on, back in those days. you had the letterman people, who were weird because they were weird and didn't... just didn't try to be anything else. i'm not a cultist of "authenticity". i think it's good to... i mean these _authentic_ people, nobody watches glendora's videos because there's no... they're pure vibe. it's weird to describe someone like glendora as "form over substance" but in a way i think her work kind of is. well, it's _amateurish_. there's a difference between being amateur and amateurish. in creative terms, i'm a bit of an eccentric amateur. for various reasons i haven't really pursued creative work professionally. at this point, the way things are now, i'm unlikely to ever be a creative professional. at the same time, i don't have what it takes to be truly amateurish. i'm too emotionally invested in what i do. i don't know if that's good or bad.

the stuff that people remember about public access most are the edgelords. the pre-internet people. the people who would curse at you and do "arty" weird things and... those are two different sorts of things, aren't they? the first part are the edgelords. the second part is more shit like "unwind with the sweeties". if i ever did a show it would probably be a lot like "unwind with the sweeties" and it wouldn't be very good. and there's overlap. "dancing with frank pacholski" is... it's offensive. what he's doing is, like, consciously offensive. there's also an _art_ to it, though. i don't appreciate the offensiveness, but i appreciate the art.

i think of public access as a protoculture, pre-mitotic. two cities had major public access culture, as far as i can tell - nyc, and austin, tx. and today i learned... the biggest name to come from unhinged public access culture was, uh. alex jones. of all the things to come from the '90s, _this guy_ was the one to make it big? _this guy_ was the one who caught on with the public? i know tinarina was never going to be famous, was never going to make it big like alex jones, probably didn't _want_ to, but to me, someone like tinarina was the best of that generation. i guess she's probably, like, a millennial, but watching her shit, that to me is the spirit of the "generation x" i remember. and it's just... it's good to know that while things were always awful, while it's legitimate that alex jones is my generation's legacy, there was something else. i wasn't just imagining it.

the glendoras of the world are still my favorite.

look at this. what is this? did janelle monae travel back in time to 1973?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bkACjFwI9E

how about this. the distortion on this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2OPA4tbAI0

i'll be honest i just like the band name here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBUjjC-PcgI

The Fantástico one is actually footage from a later version of the opening of the program, for the record.

this is the og one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWjSW3wm0BA

yeah, i had a suspicion that something... like there was shit in there that looked like post-1973 video technology was at play. there's this whole culture of creating fakes, the younger generations call it "lostwave" sometimes... lost media is different for the lost media wiki people than it is for me. for me, lost media is those 97 episodes of doctor who that _nobody_ can watch, even if some of them, like "the web of fear" episode 3, are held privately. these younger folks would call something like Maybury (the BBC2 early 1980s series starring Patrick Stewart as a kindly psychiatrist) lost media. i mean it's kind of... like tactically it's useful, because you start calling something "lost media" that's not actually lost and it gets a reputation and it turns up. people pirate it from the archives or whatever. i don't... i don't think it's _good_ to do that, i think that's unethical and it's not something i'd do myself. some of this stuff, though, it's the only way it gets seen. i mean it does benefit me and i will acknowledge that.

so maybe i should start saying _Maybury_ is lost media haha

I was just thinking of a fruit drink we used to drink when I was a kid, Five Alive. I kind of had it mixed up in my head with some local TV stations, WNEW Channel 5 (a Metromedia station) and WPIX 11 Alive. Anyway, the New Jersey Foodhound was thinking of it too, and wrote this blog post:

https://www.njfoodhound.com/2019/02/five-alive-greatest-and-rarest-of-juice.html

The Foodhound seems to esteem this stuff highly. "The Greatest and Rarest of Juice Drinks". "The king of all citrus drinks, rare and ever sought after". "One of the best god-damn tasting drinks that's ever crossed my lips." I don't know, I was a kid. It was OK. Better than Sunny Delite. Has anybody who's quaffed this since the 1980s weigh in?

It is still available in Canada. Like sunny d, one of the main ingredients is corn. And with mixed fruit beverages they are usually composed 90% of the cheapest of the listed fruits.

Yeah that's kinda how I remember it too. Not sure why this guy is so big on it. There are these websites that are... I just ran across this website. I mean real Web 1.0 vibes. Kinda impossible to navigate and filled with...

http://www.marxmuseum.com/

I mean the prose here is delightful.

We all have heard the phrase --- BIG TOYS FOR BIG BOYS !!! but this is one big toy !! It looks like a Dodge Hemi engine and look how he steers !! We wonder what the insurance agent said when thay saw this ??

Who's got a bigger smile??
BIG LOO

BIG LOO!

The happiest robot in town!

God, look at these kids. These kids look like they are about to fuck someone up here. With their plastic wiffle bat and their big wheel trike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marx_and_Company#/media/File:AN_ALLEY_IN_ROGERS_PARK,_NORTH_SIDE_OF_CHICAGO_-_NARA_-_547170.jpg

You know what my favorite toy enshrined in the National Toy Hall of Fame is? Sand. Just... Sand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Toy_Hall_of_Fame

so ok i've been going off and doing some more rabbitholing today, for two reasons:

1. so i can procrastinate doing my taxes
2. so i don't spend my day fucking around calling perfectly cisgender people "eggs" like some kind of fucking transvestigator

anyway after listening to about half of "what's rangoon to you is grafton to me", subsequent to it being referenced on a wikipedia page for goblin's suspiria, which i somehow got to by trying to find that character actor who died sometime in the '10s or so who used to sing old-timey folk songs, high and lonesome, on set, and had an album of those songs released at some point, not recorded professionally.. nothing. (that sentence should probably end, but doesn't.) couldn't find hide nor hair of it.

anyway. "what's rangoon to you is grafton to me". i'd never got around to actually listening to despite wanting to listen to it for close to a decade. kind of an australian firesign theater but with a soundtrack entirely made up of bits from the best second-tier 70s prog albums. not sure whether it's funny, the fucking _soundscape_ on this one is just fucking all-time....

i don't really do a lot of stuff with found footage or creepypasta but i got a friend who does, and i watch enough videos that videos of that sort pop up in my sidebar. one of the big viral ones this week is by Reignbot about a movie called "Saiko: The Large Family".

i can't really engage directly much with creepypasta or found footage horror. honestly i have enough problems with nightmares as it is.

nah my approach is to keep the horrors i glimpse sometimes out of the corner of my eye _in_ the corner of my eye, thank you very much. so videos _about_ disturbing creepypasta are very much in my wheelhouse, particularly since youtube's draconian monetization guidelines mean that you can't really show or talk about anything directly. which just happens to suit my aesthetic perfectly! Reignbot _still_ had to censor this movie even though NOTHING HAPPENS IN IT.

see this is the thing, this is apparently a tie-in with a sporadic "banned from broadcast" tv series, oh, you know, "ghostwatch" or whatever. but instead of setting off a _row_ apparently this thing had... they made like three movies. and this particular movie had a video done about it because it turns out it's presented in the style of a NHK series called "Japonology" which is exactly the right kind of rickety for my tastes... it's delivered in both english and japanese simultaneously, kind of an introduction to japanese culture to english speakers. here's an early episode from 2004, featuring the shakuhachi player Araki Kodō V. i admit that i went to see if i could find the first through fourth episodes featuring Araki Kodō. no, he's the fifth of his lineage. there's a sixth now. the point is i never liked the shakuhachi timbrally, but Kodō's performance is very much to my style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFGOhf_OGI

the presenter is a guy named Peter Barakan, who's been living in Japan since the '70s. you know what the show kind of reminds me of? it kind of reminds me of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, weirdly enough. or actually, that CBS show "Sunday Morning", kind of that. It's just very _friendly_. it's _definitely_ my jam. not the hyper-cheery talk TV that looks like a MrBeast thumbnail.

anyway "Saiko: The Large Family" takes this format and makes it creepy and disturbing while not actually showing anything. it's all hints, suggestions, implications. apparently mostly they're hints, suggestions, and implications that only make sense to people who have seen the previous films. this isn't one of those sequels like "Major League II" that make perfect sense without having seen the original. which makes me love it _even more_. one of the great disappointments of my young life is how fucking terrible everyone says "Leonard Part VI" was, because the _idea_ of being thrown into the middle of a series that has extensive continuity the viewer knows nothing about is _extremely_ appealing to me. i like anything that's confusing and disorienting, because i spent my life in a constant state of confusion and disorientation, and i feel like shows like that at least put me on equal footing with the other viewers. i got a copy of this pilot for an italian show that never went to series called "the fifth glacial era". the pilot is episode 5. there's no evidence that any other episodes were ever made. it's that kind of thing, that's what i'm into.

anyway, can't beat the versimilitude on this. this actually _is_ a later entry in a series that doesn't make sense without having seen the previous episodes, which i can't understand because they're in a language i don't speak. utterly delightful!

i took a brief break to go looking for... a friend is doing a movie night and wants their first theme to be outrageous splattercore films. so, uh, i probably won't go, because i'm not really into that kind of thing. but i went looking anyway. there's this lovely gore film starring jesus christ called "fist of jesus", it's a spanish short film where he punches the shit out of some zombies. cheap, corny, but not actually _bad_. i mean you could make a lot worse gore short film where the plot is jesus inflicting extreme carnage on zombies.

i was talking with a friend and he asked me if i'd heard of Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi!. and it's sort of similar in some ways to "fist of jesus" - it's a found footage show about a team of paranormal investigators. except when they find the paranormal, they punch it. i genuinely do like this sort of thing... honestly i'm surprised by how many shows i've seen that play on these few particular distinctly japanese urban legends. they're all _great_, is the thing, they're great urban legends and they're great to play around with. anytime the plot of an episode involves a ghostly hand reaching out of the toilet, i know i'm in for a good time.

at the same time, though, youtube is actually pretty good for rabbitholing, because you click a video and there are like ten other videos on the right. and usually about eight of them are crap, ah, but one might actually be something that interests me. so i'm looking for videos of old episodes of Japanology and youtube asks me "hey, wanna see a video with clips of the most popular j-pop song each month for the entire 1980s?"

well fucking _would i_, jesus yes. shit, look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRsyM03QeAs

i mean nobody _else_ seems to be the market for this, it's got, like, 16K views in the past year. some of it i recognize, like, tatsuro yamashita is basically a household name on the internet now, right? juicy fruits, though? no, i don't know juicy fruits. i mean, it's a timesweep, right? i love timesweeps. all hooks, no filler. great as timesweeps are when they're hits i know, god, they're even better when it's shit i have no clue about. 120 wall to wall bangers. well. mostly bangers. plus, _video_, you get a real feel for the A E S T H E T I C. i mean, fuck yeah.

anyway, the person who posted this - their modern j-pop videos are _way_ more popular - also did a video swap with someone just calling themselves "weeaboo", which is the youtube equivalent of naming your BBS handle after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I was "Zaphod", FWIW). anyway weeaboo's channel has been taken down by the copyright police, WHICH IS WHY I DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING FROM THE INTERNET, yes, you call me a crazy hoarding boomer now but... i mean OK. i'm also a crazy hoarder. but i'm a crazy hoarder who can link you weeaboo's list of j-pop songs that deserve more love, _before_ the copyright police come for theDX:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUqxkjEM2hc

it's three years ago, so peak covid i guess, which gives it a whole extra feel to it. and again, there's... all of the different AESTHETICS, all of the different STYLES, like some of the songs i do absolutely fucking hate but EILL i like. i know very little about... i mean, music, i barely listen to music these days. but spending nine minutes watching this video and 30 minutes gushing over it is _very_ well worth my time, in my opinion.

anyway i'm gonna go back and watch more, uh, trope talk, or something. those videos are fun. or maybe i'll do my taxes. LOL PSYCH.

god i'm getting old, there's a meme about a fansub which gratuitously uses a japanese word with a simple english translation, and then puts a footnote in translating that word... anybody remember what i'm talking about?)

all according to keikaku, kate.

OK, of all the Japanology episodes I've run across this has to be my favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKoounOcfOg

Because of course while Japanology covers all sorts of Japanese cultural features, there's some stuff they're not going to talk about. I will be _very_ surprised if they ever do an episode on, say, kinbaku. Actually, I gotta look that up, what _is_ actually the difference between "kinbaku" and "shibari"?

...OK, there doesn't seem to be a clear difference, it's just, you know, different people use different words and it doesn't matter that much. Looking that up though did bring me to Seiu Ito, who had a film made about him by Noboru Tanaka. Wikipedia says "many critics today judge Tanaka the best of Nikkatsu's Roman porno directors." "Roman porno" is apparently what Nikkatsu called their line of "pink films".

Anyway, I knew about some of the Roman porno S&M films like "Flower and Snake" and "Wife to be Sacrificed", but a lot of the others I didn't really know about. The article on "Rope Cosmetology" says:

(spoilered for graphic content) Sharp notes that the highlight of the film, in this respect, is when Tani is covered in butter and raped by a German Shepherd Dog. and "Allmovie writes of the film, "Well-directed and convincingly played, the film manages to walk the fine line between the nauseating misogyny of Japan's appalling 'turtle girl' films and the outright silliness of American and British 'pony girl' efforts, presenting a reasonable introduction to the oft-misunderstood world of erotic discipline."

I have actually never heard of 'turtle girl' films... it's not something I care to look up. I'm really not into hardcore Japanese S&M, so I know really very little about this stuff.

Regarding the film about Seiu Ito: "Allmovie calls the film "an amoral masterpiece" and one of "the most disturbing films ever released by the Nikkatsu studio". Writing that the dark and oppressive nature of the film works in its favor, the review concludes, "the cumulative effect is quite powerful, and not for the faint of heart."[5] "

IDK, none of this tracks at all with my experience with kinbaku. There's not really a moral element to me - I basically think of it as a form of autistic stimming. I'm not saying I don't have "a dangerous ambivalence towards traditional concepts of right and wrong, sanity and insanity", as Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser describe the film, but that's nothing to do with kinbaku itself.

I'm sorry, I love a lot of these quotes from Wikipedia's "Pink Film" article.

"The dominant directors of pink films of the 1980s, Genji Nakamura, Banmei Takahashi and Mamoru Watanabe are known collectively as "The Three Pillars Of Pink".[64]"
"Nakamura directed one of Japan's first widely distributed, well-received films with a homosexual theme, Beautiful Mystery: Legend of the Big Penis (1983),[66]"
"Ueno was the first director of this group to rise to prominence, acting as an "advance guard" for the group when his Keep on Masturbating: Non-Stop Pleasure (1994) won the "Best Film" award at the Pink Grand Prix.[73]"

The title of that one makes me think of Kraftwerk, honestly.

Anyway, I _am_ definitely a fan of Toei's "Pinky violence" films, like "Female prisoner #701: Scorpion". "Roman Porno" is much less my thing.

-

What was I talking about? Oh. The Japanology episode on "Women's Nylons" from series 6 in 2013. That title is absolutely peak #pointlesslygendered. It's an absolute blast to watch just to see how awkward Peter Barakan is throughout this episode. He's constantly expressing slight discomfort, but the effect I get is that of a sort of performance for the sake of social norms - like, he's constantly under pressure to stress that he's not into this or anything. Baka. Like, right out of the gate: "I'm in the hosiery department of a Tokyo department store, probably for the first time in my life. I don't imagine they get too many men in here." I suspect that it's more not _wanting_ to imagine the sort of men they get in there. I kinda hate to bring it back to this guy, but I did happen to find a book by William T. Vollman about Noh theater. There's a Japanology episode on that, too. It's not online, but I suspect it'll be pretty different from Vollmann's book, which from what I can tell is him going on for 400 pages about his transformation fetish in the most Orientalist way possible. He wouldn't be the first. I first learned about "tucking" from Ian Fleming's James Bond novel _You Only Live Twice_. I tried to see if I could figure out how to do it (very cisgender, much wow), but couldn't manage at the time, and eventually concluded that he just made that shit up. Say what you will about transformation fetish stories, at least they don't have that kinda gross orientalism thing going on.

Anyway that's kinda what I find cool about Japanology - they got a British expat presenting, but it's not orientalist at all. All this shit people say about Japan, it's nice to have kind of a clear simple explanation of this stuff from a Japanese perspective for a general audience.

Anyway the interesting thing here is that while nylons definitely _are_ a fetish for some people (I don't really think of myself as one of them), that's not the perspective they're taking here. Nah, what interests me about this episode is that it really lampshades the cultural conservatism, patriarchy, and social pressure placed on women. The narrative I'm getting from here is that women had stopped wearing nylons because, uh, there was basically never a reason for them in the first place except to appeal to the male gaze, as far as I can tell, and in response the hosiery industry cranked up the advertising and it worked, and there's now a lot of social pressure on women to wear nylons. Barakan stops women on the street and asks them "Why do you wear nylons?", which, again, is hilariously awkward, and the responses tend to be along the lines of "Well I don't really want to, it's what's expected of me."

Even more interesting to me is that the video _doesn't_ seem to have attracted the interest of any fetishists. One comment suggests the possibility of it - but the video was uploaded by someone whose other videos are other Japanology episodes, and it doesn't have more views than the other episodes. I'm pleasantly surprised by the apparent lack of creepy dudes getting off on this episode.

ok so i was watching x-men 97 and then i got sidetracked by looking up the history of the '90s show, which i didn't know about, and then i got sidetracked by the italian theme song, and then i got sidetracked by how all the italian version cartoons have absolute banger eurobeat theme songs, and there's even a band that covers the italian banger theme songs called "trick or treat". here's a cover of the theme song to jem and the holograms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPsGSQYKgI4

then for some reason the side bar decided to recommend me some made up AI thing, which is interesting and all but i'm a little iffy on it

instead here's a mixtape from the sidebar of _that_ which i guess is songs not made up by ai

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wbLNpdkGE

it's some obscure cassette label that has some cool looking shit like "afghan gold"

https://afghangold.bandcamp.com/album/r-i-p

social harmony seems to be some cassette label inspired by sublime frequencies, whose stuff i used to dig way back in the day

anyway. uh. i was supposed to be watching an x-men cartoon? idk

I do, like. Want to go through recent video log. Just... jot them down. (Some of this duplicates my last post.) A film by someone who made trans people watch the Adam Sandler film "Jack & Jill"... Sandler _doesn't_ actually play a trans woman in the movie, which is a misconception the lady who made the video had. I heard it was a remake and that the original was far worse. A video about the Strider NES game, explaining why it's bad because of Reagan (everything bad is because of Reagan, except for the stuff that was bad before Reagan. Reagan just made that stuff worse.) A bunch of "Honest Trailers" stuff, I think from watching that new X-Men series. Also the awesome anime remade opening to X-Men, which I'd seen before but which is always great. A video on the lost Evangelion AIDS PSA. A video full of banger re-recorded cartoon theme songs for the Italian market. A bunch of videos about strange bootleg toys like "the 'Evil God' bootleg Saber statue". Somebody who makes outfakes that may or may not involve AI. Mixtapes from an obscure European label with releases like "Triple Healing Mixtape". riffing on old Sublime Frequencies releases. Fox Network promos for the original Brisco County Jr. show. The circulating run of the Australian '70s horror show _The Evil Touch_, along with a bunch of obscure cable horror shows like "Perversions of Science" An audio recording of a rebroadcast of the original "Hey, Hey, Hey! It's Fat Albert" TV special (not to be confused with the later series - this is the special _Fat Albert Rotunda_ was recorded as the soundtrack for). A bunch of working materials for the unmade 1980s cartoon "Huck's Landing", including a 15 minute camcorder video showing nothing but the offices of the company that was apparently going to make it. Very "creepypasta" vibes except this apparently was a real project. Somebody talking about their hunt for a cookbook advertised on television that didn't seem to exist. Old rare recordings of Yehudi Menuhin, David Nadien, Henryk Szeryng, etc. A compilation of live performances of the songs from "Hokuto No Ken". A pitch-corrected live performance of K V Narayanaswamy at the Madras Music Academy on January 1, 1969. An enormou spile (sic) of 1970s jazz bootlegs by Air, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry, the Gil Evans Orchestra, McCoy Tyner, etc. A video explaining the Persian 17-tone system. An analysis of Mega Man's Robot Master serial codes. A career overview of Jun Togawa that I learned a lot of information from honestly. A video about the stupid shit people used to say about video games. Apparently there was a rumor that Pit Fighter or something was used as a recruiting tool for the Bavarian Illuminati. Hadn't heard that one. A 1LP edit of _Tales from Topographic Oceans_ which removes "The Ancient". Nobody likes that one. I like it because nothing fucking happens in it! A theater headcam audience bootleg of E.T. Two separate edits of "The Kirlian Witness", AKA "The Plants are Watching", a supernatural film about telepathic plants. The original broadcast of Evangelion in the US on KTEH. The episode of "Serial Experiments Lain" broadcast on KTEH immediately after 9/11. The groundbreaking early '70s porn film "LA Plays Itself". The cult film "Flash! Future Kung Fu (AKA: Health Warning Mr. Digital): "a low-budget cyberpunk epic full of 80's androgyny, shaolin monks, wicked analog tech, beefy guys in speedos, John Carpenter styled soundtrack & Chinese nazis." An unaired episode of a Cartoon Network show called "Toonheads" on "the best worst cartoons ever", sourced from Jerry Beck, who created the episode. A history of the Welsh Kingdom of Ceredigion. A video essay about the creation and aftermath of Johnny Cash's song "Chicken in Black". A video on "How Berlin became a Trans Utopia". The Doctor Who episode "Midnight" edited to look like a Hartnell-era Who episode. "Shop 'Til You Drop: Horror's Condemnation of Overconsumption". A run-down of an episode of Diagnosis: Murder where the killer was apparently an actual vampire? A bunch of videos of exploding televisions. Live performances by the extremely camp Italian singer Renato Zero. "ART METRANO IS WONDERFUL". A smattering of Doctor Who shitposts such as "Doctor Who but it's Wii music". A video essay exploring why the Western Hemisphere has never heard of Raj Kapoor's _Awara_. A video on how to identify the Satan's Bolete mushroom. A sakuga showing off how badass Precure fight scenes are. Also: A two hour history of the Precure series, which I would totally be into if it wasn't for my stubborn aversion to anything popular. (Precure is _the_ preeminent Magical Girl series, even though the West doesn't necessarily see it that way.) A one-hour history of the Planet of the Apes series. Recordings of the music of Johann Schobert, a baroque composer mostly notable for getting himself and his whole family killed by insisting on eating mushrooms that cooks at _two different restaurants_ told her were poisonous and would kill them. A video about what is apparently Saudi Arabia's current utterly ludicrous and desperate attempt to survive in a post-oil world. "Orientalism: Desert Level music vs. Actual Middle-Eastern music". "The Internet Is Dying And That's A Good Thing". A video examining Islamophobia in the context of people believing in the patently false claim that an Islamic Caliph destroyed the Library of Alexandria. (That one was interesting because it kind of shows the ripple effect on US cultural Islamophobia on other global cultures.) "Are Historical Accent Reconstructions Just Nonsense?" A five and a half hour video about North Korean popular entertainment. (Yes, I am one of those people who is not immune to North Korea clickbait. If, like. 5 1/2 hour videos counts as "clickbait".) An in-depth analysis of the _actual time signature_ of the Mother 3 song "Strong One (Masked Man)" (There's an argument to be made that it's technically 4/4.) A video about trans representation in manga that includes a section on what I find to personally be the darkest and most realistic "trans" manga. I haven't watched to see the video's creator has to say about that one. A video on Koki Mitani, who made Furahata Ninzaburo, which I do know about - it's apparently the best Japanese Columbo knockoff. Apparently Mitani's first film was his script for a parody of _12 Angry Men_, which reminds me of the Amy Schumer riff on "12 Angry Men", which brings me to "Amy Schumer and the Plague of White Feminism". This is one of those topics I don't know much about. People hate Amy Schumer like they hate, I don't know, Bo Burnham, and I'm not familiar with much of their work, why people like it, or why people hate it. I figure I might learn something by watching it.

Because I do. I do learn shit by watching these things. I saw this six minute video talking about the port of Lewiston, how it's important for international grain shipping, as well as its devastating ecological impact due to the Snake River damming. I've seen the signs protesting the Snake River dam and I never knew what it was about. And now I have some better idea. Even from a six-minute video that _didn't take a position_ on the issue, that very much took a "both sides" view of things. Six minutes.

Anyway. I should probably get more exercise or something.

ok look the shit that really fucks me up is when i start following archive.org rabbitholes

there's _so much_ incomprehensible shit out there and i _will_ wind up with some film that hasn't been translated into english based on a blurb that makes it sound interesting

Tōkyō No Kyūjitsu is interesting

https://archive.org/details/tokyo-no-kyujitsu

"A strange, surreal film in Japanese, Spanish and English. Three people become entangled in the hunt for a mysterious drug that can cure loneliness."

which means that i actually understand a third of it. mostly it's what you'd call a _vibes film_. that's where i'm at in the depths of my depravity. i'll watch stuff in a language i don't understand just because it looks interesting. it is, though!

here's something else that looks interesting:

https://archive.org/details/WayneSourbeerMontageFilm05

a montage film from the vibrant wichita, kansas underground film scene of the '50s and '60s. basically i love this because, again, it's very much a _vibes film_. it's full of shots of pinball machines from the old electromechanical era. it doesn't give a complete view of what it looks like to play an EM machine, but there are videos on youtube of that. there's a museum in paris or whatever and you can walk through and they have all the old EM bally and gottlieb machines but the context is missing. it's well-lit and bloodless. this film gives a sense of _place_ that you're not gonna get from the machines themselves. people talk about liminal spaces and to me there's some overlap between that and what sometimes gets called a "third place". like, a grocery store. it's not a "third place" proper, but it kinda negotiates the difference between a third place and a liminal space. because the thing about liminal spaces is solitude, right? it's that you're there _alone_. so alone that you feel like you maybe aren't.

i mean that's the thing about working from home, spending so much time alone. i was working in this big warehouse, big empty warehouse, in 2002-2003. 12 hour shifts on the weekends. just me, nobody else. they needed someone there in case someone called. nobody called. being here, you know, it's better, because i can at least talk on the internet, communicate that way. but wow, four years, you know? it's a long time. i've started watching movies that aren't even in english. it doesn't matter if i _understand_ it. there are a lot of things i don't understand, and i kind of like it that way. i don't understand why people like the art on EM pinball machines, for instance. i still love EM machines. like there are actual good pinball machines. all the classic pinball machines, they're _good_ machines that are _fun_ to play. the EM machines aren't fun to play.

maybe it's because it reminds me of the sesame street number counting clip. it's not a real machine, but it's based on EM and not solid-state machines (though there are electric lights and so forth). solid-state was too new back in '77 for it to have much influence. god, if there was an actual pinball machine as cool as the sesame street machine... of course because it's public education you couldn't actually do that, probably. hell, there are bits based on some other EM arcade games, i guess. like there's an EM baseball game in there. again, those games aren't _fun_ but they're _cool_. it's like the "game and watch" version of an actually fun game. like listening to tim follin make music on the 48K ZX spectrum sound chip. it sounds like shit, but god, the ingenuity in making something so brilliantly terrible-sounding, you know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFBNXwk0oU

it's like listening to a fucking _shawm_ or something

actually it probably doesn't sound as good as a shawm. you know what i mean. back when they made instruments where the primary thing they had going for them was that they were _loud_.

anyway. i still need to get back to watching the rest of that x-men show.

a good friend of mine has been looking for the english-lanuage dub of "telechat" for ages

he finally found an episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDhtP9RNYS4

the translation was supervised by emyr glasnant

which had me off on one of my usual trawls. i'm fascinated by welsh-language television but since i don't speak welsh it's a bit hard to find anything

glasnant went on to write a short horror short called "the shoe collector" from 2003, which is nowhere online

he also produced a six-part "series on sex secrets of wales" for s4c called "tabw", or "taboo", per this old bbc article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1778789.stm

i went on a trawl to find welsh-language cult television and found this, a 1975 episode of a children's show called "miri mawr":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rWos5G-CQQ

this is fantastic. i love weird 70s children's television. of course HTV's '70s children's shows are the stuff of legend, both "children of the stones" and the lesser-known works by the Bristol Boys, Baker and Martin. this one is in the welsh language, tho!

i wish there was more "vision on" online; sylveste mccoy is fantastic on that show

things it took me far too long to realise - the "vision on" insect is just the name of the show mirrored

i was trying to remember the name of this eastern european or something show from the '60s and '70s about some strange animals racing each other. it was very absurdist and a lot of fun to watch. it wasn't subbed but was the kind of show that didn't need to be subbed. a children's show of some type. i got it somewhere in my archives but i can't for the life of me tell you where. this is the problem of having a disorganized mess of an archive....

one of my fave lesser-known absurdist kids' shows is the 2005 anime "animal yokocho". it's not entirely subbed but what is subbed is so delightful to watch... it's been compared to "animaniacs" and kind of? but it's also so sweet at the same time as being absurdist, like the kind of thing real young kids could watch and parents would be entertained, because it's fucking good

from there i got to reading about gwyn alf williams, a "maverick historian and tv presenter". by "maverick" read "leftist". brilliant but also had an extremely high opinion of himself that pissed off people around him. he was part of a 13 part history of wales called "the dragon has two tongues", broadcast on HTV in 1985, presenting the leftist side of two competing narratives of welsh history. it's in english, like a lot of HTV programming.

anyway, thew Welsh Underground Network has it online:

https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/the-dragon-has-two-tongues/

i do want to be clear that when i say i'm a "communist", which i do sometimes, i don't mean that i'm a marxist-leninist. i'm pretty strongly opposed to marxist-leninist thought. a lot of the negative ideas people still have about communism is because of the ongoing association of "communism" with marxist-leninist thought. this was understandable when this was the form of communism put into practice. i'm glad it failed. i think it was bad. i'm glad that leftist history is being preserved and made available, though.

anyway i gotta shower and get ready for brunch!

Best thread <3

i don't _think_ it was fantadroms. or lava-lava. i don't think it's lava-lava either.

ah well. it'll turn up when i least expect it. anyway here's an animated opening intro for a series of late-night sci-fi and horror films on west german television.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXs3s-quWI

OK I'm gonna be honest. I'm not exactly sure how I came across this. 251 views in two years. Uploaded by the guy who built the robot. I mean the star of the show is the guy hosting this thing, because wow, this guy just gives off _tremendous_ asshole vibes. I could be wrong on that, he could have been an incredibly sweet guy, but he just comes off as a massive fucking dick and probably drunk. Maybe that's not fair of me to say. I don't know. Something about him just rubs me the wrong way.

Oh the link. Whoops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crz7SE-DGV0