For the members of the trailblazing technopop crew Yellow Magic Orchestra, video games have always been a potent influence. The legendary group—superstars of their day in Japan, but now renowned the world over for influencing a variety of genres—famously sampled sounds from the arcade games Circus and Space Invaders on their self-titled 1978 debut album in a pair of interludes entitled “Computer Game,” being the first to ever do so on a major record. The three of them were hooked on arcade games, hitting up coffee shops and restaurants in Tokyo to play them whenever they could. “I didn’t know where they were from,” YMO member Haruomi Hosono told the Red Bull Music Academy in a 2014 interview, “but as a techno musician, I felt close to that industry.” Learning that his favorite arcade games were, in fact, products of Japan only served to deepen his appreciation for the medium. “I felt really excited by that and played those games a lot,” he said. “Day in and day out.” The title of the track “Technopolis” from YMO’s 1979 crowning achievement Solid State Survivor was a nod to the burgeoning spread of technology that was transforming daily life in Tokyo—part of that, of course, was the rapid proliferation of video games.

The influence would prove to be cyclical; Yellow Magic Orchestra’s forward-facing electronic music boldly made use of cutting-edge technology. Their use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which appeared for the first time on any album in 1981’s BGM—would inspire a generation of video game composers to push themselves to new heights. Chrono Trigger composer Yasunori Mitsuda, Final Fantasy Tactics composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Animal Crossing composer Toru Minegishi are among many that hold the group in high regard. Minegishi would slyly reference Yellow Magic Orchestra in the Animal Crossing series with a track called “K.K. Technopop,” using the term initially coined to describe YMO’s music in the late ‘70s. Sakimoto heaped praise on the group in an interview with Nintendo Life, saying that “Thousand Knives” is his first example of a song he wishes he had written himself. Yellow Magic Orchestra gave to the medium of video games just as much as they borrowed from it.

Even after going their separate ways due to creative differences making it difficult for them to keep working together, the members of YMO would continue to play around with the sounds of games. Following the group’s 1983 swan song Service (until their reunion album Technodon ten years later), Haruomi Hosono entered one of the most productive periods of his career. He would compose music for department stores, art exhibits, ballets, and, notably, an anthology of music from arcade games. You’d be forgiven for thinking the music contained within Hosono’s 1984 album Video Game Music is simply audio collected directly from games, but it’s something far more impressive: a recreation of music from video games, made only with a synthesizer. The tracks sound shockingly indistinguishable from genuine playthroughs of a handful of Namco classics including Pac-Man, Libble Rabble, and Mappy. Starting screens, gameplay, and high score entry are all featured, offering a vertical slice of the audible experience of getting a quick game in.

Two exceptions were the first track “Xevious” and the final track “Galaga,” which bookended the album with original compositions, using the sounds from those respective titles to make multi-faceted technopop diamonds not unlike what you’d hear on a typical Yellow Magic Orchestra release. That Hosono would give Xevious special attention made sense—it was his favorite video game. “I played it until I could clear the stages,” he said. With these two tracks, a direct line was being drawn from influence to synthesis.

“We were the only ones who gave game music any attention,” Hosono said, and he wasn’t wrong. Yellow Magic Orchestra were the first feature video game sounds on an album of music, and Hosono would be the first to release an album of video game sounds as music. “Normally it’s something that would be considered to be like Muzak, but the music for games like ‘Xevious’ and ‘Super Mario Brothers’ was excellent,” Hosono would say. He wanted to acknowledge that the sound designers for these games, like Hosono, were legitimate composers that deserved to be recognized. “I thought it was a good idea to record their music for posterity,” he said. “It wasn’t very common back then.”

It’s hard to imagine a period of time when the prevailing idea was that video game music wasn’t worth preserving or listening in any context outside of playing a game, but it tracked with the contemporary perception that video games were fleeting entertainment rather than an artistic medium. Hosono’s recognition of video game music would end up being prophetic—both in the change in sentiment that was looming just beyond the horizon, but also in more immediate and material changes to the way video game music was treated. The success of Video Game Music encouraged YMO’s parent label Alfa to create a sub-label called G.M.O. (short for Game Music Organization) only a couple of years later, working closely with companies like Konami, Nintendo, Hudson, Tecmo, and Sega to produce more anthologies of music from video games.

Naturally, having such a close relationship with the music of video games would eventually mean that the members of Yellow Magic Orchestra would compose for games too. Yukihiro Takahashi was the first, composing for the Super Famicom action RPG Neugier in 1993. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s project is more well known: he provided music for the alien life simulator L.O.L.: Lack of Love, released for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000 and developed by a studio of Square Enix defectors called Love-de-lic. It was named for the YMO release Technodelic, director Kenichi Nishi’s favorite album. But what about Haruomi Hosono?

Hosono, too, would contribute his talents to a video game, but despite the fascination he brings to virtually every phase of his long and multitudinous career, the project is rarely discussed. There are a few reasons, and at least one is easy to intuit: LATTICE 200EC7 is very, very obscure. The game, released in 2000 in the comet tail of the PlayStation’s life cycle, was developed by Nousite—a company that still exists, but bowed out of the business of console games not long after LATTICE was released. It’s not a particularly accessible game, either. It’s a weird shoot ‘em up with an on-rails first person control scheme, but with a Kula World-esque gimmick in which you rotate around the rail to navigate through labyrinthine levels. It aims to be an immersive audiovisual experience, something akin to Rez—interesting, but destined to have limited appeal.

Another, more abstract reason for the lack of knowledge of Hosono’s involvement is that he likely doesn’t remember that he even created this music. Feeling such fatigue from being famous that couldn’t be seen in public, Hosono retreated deeper into the shadows following YMO’s dissolution. He turned his attention from the trappings of pop music into something more spacious and formless. “I was adrift in the sea of ambient music,” he said of his time making music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Some of his most well-regarded music today—like the compositions he made for Muji retail stores in 1984, which have become popular due to spreading like wildfire within YouTube’s algorithm—he claimed in an interview with Vice to have no memory of making. Hosono was hitting the reset button and trying to find his musical center during this time, keeping himself busy by collaborating in strange and unlikely places.

LATTICE 200EC7 is unique for its obscurity despite its place in the oeuvre of a popular artist, but that’s not the only reason it’s fascinating. It possesses a quality that makes it fairly unique: the ability to be appreciated both as a game, and a standalone musical object. The PlayStation’s use of the compact disc format afforded games the ability to have music on a disc in CDDA-quality, and to allow them to be accessible with a CD player. Not all games made use of this, but LATTICE did—meaning that if you owned the game, you also owned a Haruomi Hosono album you could pop into your hi-fi setup.

By the late ‘90s Hosono’s interest was evolving yet again; he was shifting from ambient back to rhythmic forms, though not necessarily similar to the stuff he made with YMO. Following a chance meeting with UK producers Mixmaster Morris and Jonah Sharp at his Quiet Lodge studio, Hosono flirted with more cerebral forms of house and techno, experimenting with dance music that was harder to dance to. The LATTICE soundtrack is packed with complex jungle rhythms, its closest neighbor being 1995’s anxious masterpiece N.D.E. Most of the music on LATTICE is original, though the title screen track has an interesting story unto itself: it was composed for the international 1995 Summer Universiade sporting event and played during the ceremonies. Why he decided to re-use it is anyone’s guess.

Yukihiro Takahashi’s Neugier soundtrack feels a bit like a facsimile of his music in 16-bit; the Super Famicom wasn’t a format he had experience in or that he would return to, and the music seems to suffer from a lack of the full range of dynamics he was accustomed to. Similarly, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Lack of Love soundtrack, though not as hampered by the Dreamcast’s higher resolution sound, was held back by the GD-ROM format and compressed, unable to be heard in its full glory until it was released as a standalone disc. Haruomi Hosono’s LATTICE 200EC7 soundtrack, however, was uncompromising in sound and scope.

It feels appropriate that the first person to take the initiative to present video game music as something worth considering as its own piece of art would make video game music that could be appreciated both in and out of context with the work that accompanied it. The evolution of technology that inspired Hosono and his friends to make music that sounded like the future enabled him to create something that embodies the respect he shared for video games and music equally. Even today, it feels a little futuristic that the same disc that works in your PlayStation also works in your CD player. If you ever chance upon a copy of LATTICE 200EC7, you should try playing it. Both ways. :) ✿

Thanks for reading this sixteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy.

This piece was originally published for the second issue of Lost in Cult’s Lock-On gaming journal. The magazine is long out of print and I’m still really proud of this piece, so I got their blessing to share it more widely. I’ve done some editing and added even more information.

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Prince is an artist that doesn’t need any introductions, but I will nevertheless attempt: he was a freakish genius, a multi-instrumentalist, a producer, and a one-man talent agency. He maintained a career that spanned four decades, cut short only because of his untimely passing in 2016. There were peaks and valleys in his popularity, like all great musicians, but he consistently managed to catapult himself back into the conversation due to his adaptability to changing landscapes. When The Revolution—the backing band that helped propel him into superstardom with Purple Rain—dissolved, he didn’t waste any time getting back into the studio by himself. He put together one of the best albums of his career, Sign “☮︎” the Times, while his personal and professional relationships were in a mercurial state. This period was so prolific that the label executives at Warner Bros. had to negotiate with Prince to cut down the length of the album; it ended up releasing as “only” a double LP instead of an absurd triple-record affair.

Prince’s versatility wasn’t limited to his musical talent. His headlong embrace of new technology was undoubtedly a major factor in his ability to stave off irrelevancy. He was an early adopter of the Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer that few musicians could even afford in the mid 1980s. Prince’s vault where he hoarded his vast reserves of unreleased music had a DOS-based computer cataloging system on its front end, affectionately called Mr. Vault Guy, that accounted for the contents of every tape, disc, and hard drive. He was also much earlier than most to the idea of internet distribution, stubbornly insisting on selling his triple-disc box set of non-album rarities, Crystal Ball, through his own website in 1998, to the detriment of sales potential. (A rarer edition of Crystal Ball contained his first album of orchestral arrangements and his first album of acoustic singer-songwriter ballads as fourth and fifth discs—a very Prince move to make some of his most interesting material the hardest to get your hands on.)

Given his love for the bleeding edge of progress, it only makes sense that Prince would become interested in video games. In 1994, when Prince Interactive was released, it was yet another volatile period for the artist. To set the stage a little bit: his final album with Warner, Come, was set to release in two months. He purposely refused to promote the new project as a means of spiting the label, ending his contractual obligations by cooperating as little as possible. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol the year before, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.” The name of the game, technically, isn’t even Prince Interactive, but until the purple one’s signature glyph is properly adopted in a Unicode set we have to call it something.

Cyan’s genre-defining adventure game Myst released a year prior to Interactive, and the similarities are more than superficial. You find yourself in a fictionalized version of Prince’s home and recording studio Paisley Park, solving arcane point-and-click puzzles. Broadly, the objective is to search the mansion and assemble the scattered pieces of the musician’s eponymous symbol as if they’re fragments of the Triforce, though in practice this amounts to a flimsy excuse to poke around and uncover various Prince-related easter eggs. There are an abundance of music snippets, photos, and interviews with other musicians—Eric Clapton, George Clinton, and Miles Davis all make appearances. The game even kicks off with an exclusive song called “Interactive,” ostensibly a song about being a song in a video game. (He would pull a similar move years later with “Cybersingle,” a recursive song about the fact that you could download it from the Internet.)

So how much input did Prince actually have in the creation of Interactive? In his own words, not much. When asked in an interview published on his official website about his role on the project, he flatly responded: “Eye had virtually nothing 2 do with it.” I’d believe that he wasn’t doing any active consulting, but Prince’s words should always be received with healthy skepticism. Parts of the digitized version of Prince’s estate are startlingly accurate, long before visitations were available to the public. Look up photos and you’ll see just how much the interior looks like an adult playground; I find it hard to believe the developers would have gotten it so right without a guided tour. There are also several then-unreleased songs that would appear on forthcoming releases (Come two months later, The Gold Experience in 1995, and Crystal Ball in 1998), which betrays a level of access.

The next year, the publisher would face stiff headwinds. Graphix Zone chief executives Charles Cortright and Angela Aber gave up their positions following a merger with another multimedia firm, leaving the new management with a mountain of debt. They reported losses of around $15 million in the preceding couple of years. Another merger was attempted with the developer Inscape, most famous for their own multimedia artist game Bad Day on the Midway featuring the eyeball-masked experimental group The Residents. The company seems to have shuttered in 1997 without finding a path to profitability, releasing an educational disc chronicling the career of Herbie Hancock as their swan song. Ultimately, Interactive wasn’t successful, nor was it especially unique; JUMP: The David Bowie Interactive CD-ROM was of similar fare and released months earlier. Graphix Zone would even outdo themselves in scope shortly after with Highway 61 Interactive, their virtual Bob Dylan museum.

What ends up being most interesting about Interactive is not necessarily how it innovates, but how it’s indicative of its time. Functionally, it does little to stand out from contemporary adventure games like Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, or Day of the Tentacle. Historically, it acted as an important document for fans and scribes looking to document the inner workings of Prince’s operation; despite all the fantastical embellishments of his Minnesota home, like sprawling underground catacombs and staircases reaching across galaxies, this was the only way to get a somewhat accurate walkthrough of his studio. Thematically, it tells a story of Prince’s legacy as it stood in the mid ‘90s—full of references to his unassailable accomplishments, but also serving to build up hype for the second act of his career. ✿

Thanks for reading this fifteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy, purple people.

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Paisley Park is in your heart. 💜

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Compilations were the backbone of my musical education. When I wanted to get into a genre but didn’t have the slightest clue where to start, it was always a safe bet to trust the judgment of someone who cared enough to put together a primer for you. Before the advent of sprawling genre or “vibe” playlists on platforms and Spotify and YouTube—at first curated by real humans, though rarely the case these days—collections of related music had to be assembled by people that knew their stuff. As a kid, I would often see a series called Hard to Find 45s on CD populating the bargain bins of department stores and the seldom-disturbed CD racks in thrift shops. Each disc would focus on a narrow period of time in pop music history (sometimes as vague as “the ‘60s” or as specific as “1957-1959”), with liner notes providing some quick facts about each artist featured.

The More Sixties Classics edition was the first one I purchased, and I was surprised to find a lengthy essay inside by music historian Greg Adams which laid out the mission statement for the series. The parent label, Eric Records, was founded in 1986 on the conception that it would only publish 45 RPM singles of oldies pop hits, with the intention of keeping them available in perpetuity. When the arrival of the compact disc pushed vinyl record players out of American homes, the label needed a new strategy—and so they started publishing their vast catalog of yesteryear’s songs on CD compilations, keeping them accessible and affordable. At a glance, these compilations look like cheap junk. It’s entirely likely you’ve glossed over them in record shops, their unassuming and near-identical covers making them invisible to your eye. But these things were the backbone of oldies stations; if you ever heard a disc jockey spin “Look for a Star” by the late ’50s crooner Garry Miles, there’s a high likelihood it was one of these discs in the console.

For international music, especially before the internet was as accessible and populated with information as it is today, a well-curated compilation was especially important. Labels like Sublime Frequencies completely transformed my idea of music from the Eastern Hemisphere, and I’m not sure I’d have even a passing interest in North African music if not for the anthologies Sahel Sounds put together. My strongest enduring interest is in Japanese new wave, though my introduction to it was strange. In my teenage years, on a blog I’ve long forgotten the name of, I found a curious little omnibus called Tokyo Mobile Music I. It’s sort of the total antithesis of a useful compilation for getting you up to speed about something brand new to you.

Let’s have a look at the liner notes, which is only three sentences:

Collating the tracks for this album has not proved to be the easiest of tasks. However I hope these tracks will serve as a foretaste of what is to come from Japan in the future. The Mobile Suit Corporation will be focusing on the East and unearthing as much new talent as possible.
—David Claridge

It says nothing about the artists comprising the tracklist and peddles a promise of prospective importance rather than attempting to illustrate a cohesive picture of an existing scene. I’m not sure why I should trust Mr. Claridge to be the guy to surface new talent from Japan, either. So who is he?

David Claridge is best known as the creator and puppeteer of Roland Rat—a name unlikely to ring a bell to most, but if you were a wee lad or lassie in the UK in the 1980s he was a bigger deal than even Kermit the Frog. Unlike his most comparable peer in the industry of puppetry, Jim Henson, Claridge stayed out of the public eye and let his rascally rodent friend do most of the talking. He kept public appearances to a minimum and scarcely did interviews, seeming content to focus on his craft.

A scant few details about him do exist, mostly about his activities outside of puppeteering. As a young kid he immersed himself in theater, studying mime arts and stage acting from the age of 12. After moving from Birmingham to London he became fascinated with the local club circuit in the late ’70s, right around the peak of the New Romantic movement. It seemed like a logical fit for someone with an interest in the performing arts; the style and attitude of the emerging scene drew heavily from the aesthetics of cabaret and commedia dell’arte. He became a regular at Blitz, the nightclub considered ground zero for the New Romantics, until its closure in 1981.

Claridge tried to fill the void by planting his roots at other clubs, but eventually grew bored of the New Romantic milieu. He felt it had adopted the problems that led to its creation as a counterweight to punk culture: it had become stale and predictable. His desire to create something new was partially inspired by a burgeoning interest in Japanese music, which he said in an interview for a local magazine was setting his mind alight with new possibilities. Unsatisfied with the state of London nightlife, he created his own roving club experience called The Mobile Suit, combining Japanese costuming with imported music from their fast developing new wave scene. He toured The Mobile Suit around the country, to modest success. (Interestingly, Claridge’s nomadic troupe is still remembered fondly among fetish enthusiasts.)

Seeing an opportunity to introduce Britons to music from what he called the “Far East,” he worked with major label Phonogram to create an imprint called The Mobile Suit Corporation aimed at highlighting his latest obsession. The label would ultimately not amount to much before he abandoned the venture to return to puppets; the bulk of its output would be a single LP and a set of supporting singles for the Indian-themed group Monsoon. There was, at least, one honest attempt at seeing his vision through: Tokyo Mobile Music I, a compilation of the new music from Japan that Claridge found to be most forward-thinking.

Because there are no liner notes to speak of, it’s not clear why Claridge selected this particular collection of songs. If I had to guess, these are the records he encountered in his personal explorations around Tokyo. The only documentation of his travels are the short field recordings between songs, taped on his handheld Sony Walkman pictured on the album cover. They’re an audible travelogue of him hopping on and off public transit, skulking around in stores, and eavesdropping on people making orders at a Shibuya McDonald’s. It also seems that he had every intention to make it a series of releases, given the title bears a roman numeral, but there would only ever be the first installment.

The lack of any useful information about the artists herein fascinated me as a curious listener that had never heard anything like any of these tracks before. Tokyo Mobile Music I is an incomplete picture, compiled by an amateur that was only just beginning to grasp what he was seeing. I had to do a lot of my own legwork to learn about these artists and understand where they fit into the history of Japanese music, so I’ve taken the liberty to write some liner notes for this release myself. I hope they’ll be a good jumping point to find some new music you love.

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Hikashu

If Yellow Magic Orchestra is patient zero of Japanese new wave, Hikashu was hot on their heels. The band would reinvent themselves a fair few times in their career, flirting with prog, jazz fusion, and melancholic darkwave—but by the release of Tokyo Mobile Music I only had a couple albums to their name. I don’t think it would be too derisive to call their early output pretty straight-ahead Kraftwerk worship, especially considering one of the two songs they contribute to the compilation is a cover of the German group’s biggest hit “The Model.” Vocalist Makigami Koichi, with a vocal style inspired by Kabuki theater, gives the Japanese language rendition a bit of unique texture. The other track, “New Tribe” comes from their 1981 album うわさの人類 (Uwasa No Jinrui, TL: The Legend of Humanity), which marks the beginning of their more experimental pivot.

Akiko Yano

Also represented by two tracks, both from her art-pop masterpiece ただいま。(Tadaima, TL: I’m home), is Akiko Yano. She studied jazz piano in high school, became a sought-after studio mercenary shortly after graduating, and before her 21st birthday had begun work on her first studio album. Through industry connections she met her one-time life partner and lifetime musical partner of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who produced Tadaima. and supported her with writing and arrangements. The standout track is “Rose Garden,” which seems to have just about every sound a well-equipped studio can make—wobbling bass, thumping taiko drums, and quivering vocoded voice like a wounded animal heard through a high-speed oscillating fan.

Earthling

Earthling might be the most difficult artist on Tokyo Mobile Music to find any information about. The short-lived dance punk trio was Jin Haijima on vocals and lead guitar, Yoko Fujiwara on bass, and a man credited mononymously as John on the keys. John and Yoko (no, not those) were textile and fashion designers before starting a band together, and presumably went back to their careers after putting out two records in ’81 and ’82. “You Go on Natural” appears on both albums, as a studio cut on their debut Dance and as a live recording on the follow-up Rhythm. For whatever reason, Claridge decided to pick the live version here, but I think it’s the right choice; the song’s a bit one-note but the sounds of a crowd coming alive give it a much-needed energy infusion.

Yukihiro Takahashi

Takahashi probably needs the least introduction of any artist featured here, but nevertheless: he was one third of the internationally treasured Yellow Magic Orchestra—the group’s percussionist, occasional vocalist, and writer of songs like “Rydeen” and “Ballet.” Of the three, Takahashi’s interest in new wave was the strongest. He would go out of his way to form working relationships with English musicians, eventually flying to London to record with many of his New Romantic heroes on 1981’s Neuromantic. But before he had the opportunity to work with musicians from Roxy Music, he was content to simply imitate them; on “Mirrormanic,” from his second album Murdered by the Music, he digs deep to give his best version of Bryan Ferry.

Shoukichi Kina & Champloose

It’s easy to feel like Tokyo is all that matters in the landscape of Japanese popular music, but so much is owed to people that have been pushed to the fringes. Shoukichi Kina, from the southernmost Okinawa Prefecture, insists on putting his culture front and center. He performs Okinawan folk standards alongside songs he’s written himself, and though he’s a proficient guitar player also makes frequent use of an electrified sanshin—the indigenous instrument of the Ryukyuan people that, through a century of iteration, became the shamisen in mainland Japan. Featured here is “ミミチリ坊主” (Mimichiri Bozu, TL: ear-cutting monk) an Okinawan traditional song meant as a lullaby for children. The mimichiri bozu is a yōkai that threatens to lop off the ears of young boys if they stay up past their bedtime. Eek!

Lizard

Claridge writes that the artists featured offer a “foretaste of what is to come from Japan,” but Lizard has the distinction of being the one act whose story appeared to be over. Originally formed in 1972 under the name 紅蜥蜴 (Benitokage, TL: Crimson Lizard), the band put out a series of lo-fi 7” singles recorded in dingy live houses. Influenced by glam rock, the group gradually transformed as English punk started to wash up on Japanese shores. By 1978, when they rebranded as “Lizard,” they were on the frontlines of Japan’s nascent punk scene. The group disbanded in 1982 due to their frontman, Momoyo, being incarcerated on drug charges. He wouldn’t sit in the slammer for long, but the experience seems to have scared him straight; Lizard would remain dormant for four more years and would only release one more album and an EP before calling it quits for good. The song featured here is “SA・KA・NA,” which Lizard recorded on several occasions. This is an especially obscure version from a 1980 single labeled “Disco Style,” though it sounds more like ska than anything else.

Salon Music

Credit to David Claridge: in at least one instance, he really did put his money where his mouth was. New wave rockers Salon Music would go on to have a long career and put out twelve albums, but by this point in 1982 had yet to put out their first. The first song they ever released, “Hunting in Paris,” debuts here in a rough early form. The Mobile Suit Corporation, the sublabel Claridge created under Phonogram (where he did A&R work), also pressed a split single of “Hunting in Paris” alongside Lizard’s “SA・KA・NA” on the B-side. Salon Music would polish up the song and record it again for their inaugural record My Girl Friday, but their scrappy beginnings can be heard on Tokyo Mobile Music I.

Thanks for reading this fifteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Having a good 2026 so far? Good. Me neither.

I’ll be making a serious push to publish at least two things a months from here on out. If you like the newsletter and consider it worth your while, I’d ask you to consider making a donation on Ko-fi! There’s an option for a recurring monthly donation, which would really help me maintain this thing in something more resembling a full-time capacity. I will work hard to make sure it’s worth it for you!

Okay, see you next time. Byeee. 💜

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There’s a rainbow-colored box I keep under my bed that every greeting card I’ve ever been sent lives inside. Most of them are from my godmother, who mails me a card on each birthday, holiday, and sometimes just because she was thinking of me. She hand-writes a short message on the right-hand side of every card; she rarely writes more than a few words, but it’s different every time. She picks the perfect card, grabs an envelope to match, writes my address on the front, and respectfully puts an honorific in front of my name. Within a few days to a week of receiving it, I always get a call making sure it reached its destination. She could simply send a text when I’m on her mind, or wire me money if she wants to send me a gift, but there’s an intentionality to adding those extra steps.

A perfunctory check-in would be fine enough, and even appreciated, but exerting a little more effort to do something you don’t need to do communicates care. Like my godmother, I love to send handwritten cards. I draw pictures, slip handmade bookmarks inside, and write something that reminds the recipient that I’ve been paying attention to what they’re going through. I don’t expect anything in return; I just want my friends to know they’re worth spending a little of my most precious resource—time.

Here again, for the fourth time, I’m inviting some dear friends to participate in my annual tradition where I give them some space on my newsletter to talk about themselves. They can reflect on their year however they choose and provide some lists of things they spent their time on. This thing takes work—contacting everyone, fielding questions, giving feedback, editing their writing, and formatting the post. It’s a little stressful. Some of them push the deadline way too close. It’s a lot more special than just saying “happy new year,” though, isn’t it?

Likewise, I’m grateful that they all take time out of their busy lives for me. First and foremost, it’s a selfish gesture because my friends are brilliant and I want to read their writing. But it’s also a gift to you, dear reader, because there’s so much you get to learn from them. Thanks and enjoy.

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Baxter

2025 has been a year dedicated to the sensation of stasis, even though it wasn’t really at all. No year is. I did plenty (my three lifebloods of fiction and criticism and translation! played around with making a game! played around with making a video! played around with playing around!) and experienced just as much (lots of cooking with my partner; fostering a growing interest in flowers; plenty of less fun or pretty stress causers and sadness flares; losing sight of god and starting to drink energy drinks), but the whole year feels like a ghost to me already. I look back and all I see is empty air.

I did play Unlimited Saga, though.

Unlimited Saga is a game people hate. The world has decided, over the more than two decades since its release, that Unlimited Saga is a dumpster fire, a complete mess, one of the worst games on the PS2 and a startling low point of the RPG genre writ large.

No game in my entire life has ever stuck itself more deeply into my brain.

A radical experiment in pulling at the inherent abstraction of video games (to quote SaGa series mastermind Akitoshi Kawazu, their goal was “putting a knife into the flank of reality”) and exploring the medium as a collection of symbols, Unlimited Saga is aggressively opaque, eschewing traditional design at every turn and resolutely refusing to explain itself. How exactly is the turn order decided? How does the reel battle system work exactly? Where should I go? Who should I use? How does magic work? Everywhere you look is some mechanic-turned-question, purposefully obfuscated to encourage interacting with it on an instinctual level, all wrapped up in static images and unpainted board game pieces. It is a game that worships the eternal push and pull of understanding and not.

But god, how it blossoms. With enough time in its mist of mysteries, enough hours sitting with the frustrations that Things Aren’t Going The Way I Want, Unlimited Saga slowly reveals itself. You realize you’ve been engaging with all sorts of systems you didn’t even know about, that without even noticing you’ve begun to understand how different things work. You start to care about its cast and clock the dense interlocking world and narrative at play, callbacks and moments from different playthroughs constantly returning with renewed importance and poignancy. The abstraction unfurls and you start to see how everything really is—beautiful, in a way you never knew.

I look back at 2025 and think I see empty air. But is air ever really empty? I’m sure one day, weeks or months or years from now, moments from 2025 will return to me. Maybe they’ll be moments I can’t remember right now, maybe they’ll be the ones I can, but either way, they’ll find their way back to me. Until then, I’ll just keep on enjoying this period of not knowing.

Until then, I’ll just keep on enjoying the air.

“Life is like a box(ed copy) of Unlimited Saga” - Forrest Gump if he was cool

A 2025 list (like a SaGa game, I’ll let you figure out what kind)

1. The word “bouquet”

2. Camp de Thiaroye (dir. Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow, 1988)

3. Dub Specialist’s “Juk Incorporation”

4. Kimchi nabe

5. Ravens Shouldn’t Wear Kimono by Chisato Abe

6. Guardians of the Harvest (dir. Riko Hiro, 2025)

7. The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

8. The collected manga of Fumiko Okada

9. Tragic Error (dir. Louis Feuillade, 1913)

10. Making a Wizardry map with pencil and paper

flapricot

2025 was a year spent stuck in the mud. It was another stretch marked mainly by various neuroses, pointless existentialism, confusion, anxiety, self-consciousness, and stagnation—the same mucky cycles and patterns that have defined my last half-decade. My life has materially changed very little since I moved across the US in 2021: same job, same apartment, same basic routines. When I looked back at the start of my annual planner in preparation for writing this, I was crushed to rediscover that almost every little goal or hope or theme I’d written down to work on in 2025 is something I’ve been recently thinking about focusing on in 2026. I spend less time on my creative work than ever: the mid-scale animation project I wanted to have done by last year still basically exists only as a series of notes and just-begun project files. I hit a “milestone” age but in some ways feel like less of a functioning human than the 24-year-old I was at the start of the pandemic. I spiral every time I think about the state of the world and my and my friends’ future in it. And time keeps on accelerating, lately to such a degree that has me freaked out. I’m in a loop and it’s going faster and faster—spinning the tires and never getting traction, or something like that.

But in the interest of leaning away from my inclination towards negativity, I want to acknowledge the little changes that have loosened my stuckness just a bit. In the back half of the year, I started meditating with a degree of intention I haven’t previously allowed myself. I’ve made small but steady progress in my little martial arts practice. I’ve had the chance to dive into worlds of art I always knew I’d love but never taken the time to explore. I got to contribute to a successful and very fun charity event for the second year in a row. I feel ever more love for the world and the people I know. I’m so grateful to my partner and my sister and my friends (Shy is very much included here) who continue to push and encourage me. I’m telling myself 2026 will be better, at least on a personal level. I’m going to make more eye-searing images and learn new things and be more honest with myself and those around me and maybe find a way to get out of the years-old mud, but if I were only to allow myself one concrete goal: I want to live my life in such a way that, by this time next year, I’ll be able to call more people my friend than I do now.

9 things I encountered in 2025 that resonated with me on a subcellular level

• “Good House” as performed live by Deakin — I got to see Panda Bear perform twice this year, and his long-time Animal Collective bandmate Deakin opened the second time. I’ve heard live recordings of “Good House“ probably forty times over the years, even before it was recorded and released on his debut album, but I never imagined just how massive it would be in person. Basically every Deakin song is a masterpiece of directness and earnestness, and those clear and loving lyrics wrapped in such an enormous, thudding wall of sound just about popped my soul.

• Saturn — This first happened in very late 2024 but I’m including it here because it happened a couple more times this year and it continues to floor me: I saw Saturn through my dinky consumer-grade telescope. Saturn is a real place, and the rings really are there. The gap between intellectually understanding those facts and taking in the actual sensory reality of it with your own eyes is pretty enormous, so I recommend seeing it for yourself if you can.

• Creation (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1979) — I got the chance to see over 30 Brakhage films screened this year. Creation might be my favorite of those: like many of his films, it uses concrete imagery to achieve abstract ends (and, maybe, vice versa), and the rhythms and colors in this one are just sublime.

• “Fruit Bowl” jinjunmei tea — My partner and I got really into tea this year. The “Fruit Bowl” jinjunmei from white2tea was maybe not the absolute best tea we drank (it is really delicious, to be clear), but I think its surprising flavor is emblematic of the sheer variety in taste that can come out of this one single kind of leaf without any additives or flavorings, just different processing methods developed and handed down over centuries.

• Kirby Air Riders — Like having my wish granted without ever knowing I had it. They made a sequel to the kinesthetically-greatest piece of software of all time, and it’s even better than the original? C’mon.

• War and War by László Krasznahorkai — War and War changed my brain chemistry just a little. Krasznahorkai has a reputation as a “challenging” writer, but I promise I’m not showing off or anything when I say this couldn’t be a breezier read. The headspace you get into while reading these breathlessly long, mellifluous sentences is so freeing, and the format works so perfectly in service of this strange, sad character study.

• Caves of Qud’s big finale — Caves of Qud is a complex, beautifully-written roleplaying game that I’ve played on and off for years, but I reached its ending for the first time back in February. It wouldn’t be fair to detail any aspect of it here, but I’ll say it is a very beautiful capstone to a very beautiful game.

• April (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024) — A film which features, among other things, a vehicle getting stuck in the mud, and later freed with a little help.

• “greaser (panda bear version)” by The Crying Nudes - I guess I can’t help but mention Panda Bear twice. I have periods where I think I’ve outgrown Animal Collective and their various side projects—I’ve been listening to and obsessing over them for half my life at this point—but something in Noah’s voice and words continues to speak to me very deeply and maybe always will. His series of “remixes” (which are basically just new Panda Bear songs that use their source track as sampling material or a backing track) is consistently among his best work, and this one, built off the lovely Dean Blunt-produced original, is another dazzler.

Jai

When I was younger, my teachers loved playing the 2005 movie Coach Carter in school. And I loved watching it! Sam Jack plays a basketball coach who inspires a bunch of kids to not only excel at sports, but also their studies. There’s a great speech in the middle where he says: “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Years later, I found out this quote is actually from a dubious self-help book, but the point stands!

I always slightly fear looking back on my year. I think it’s incredibly easy to feel like you haven’t been as productive as you wanted to be. Humans are naturally hardwired to think the least of themselves. But there’s a lesson there! We are more powerful than we think. So we should be kinder to ourselves too.

Here’s some stuff I loved this year:

My favourite YouTube videos I watched in 2025

• The best bald head — A news report by Nippon Television News Japan

  • My favourite quote: “On a night with a full moon, bald men gather to celebrate.”

• xboom by will.i.am — I have long been tracking will.i.am’s tech career because it seems like he releases a new product annually that nobody needs.

  • My favourite quote: “We put the AI in radio.”

• Chick-fil-A Service Crisis - G-Ninge

  • My favourite quote: “Used to be free range / Crazy to see how you’ve changed”

• Ceiling fans at Subway restaurant in Montreal, Canada

  • My favourite quote: “HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

My favourite TV shows I watched for the first time

• True Detective Season 1

• Ikebukuro West Gate Park

• HERO

• Long Vacation

• Pluribus

My favourite manga (and one book on manga) I read for the first time this year

• Eike Exner’s Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics

• Maki Fujiwara’s My Picture Diary

• Tadao Tsuge’s Trash Market

• Kenshin Shinzato’s The Habu Hunter

• Fumiko Takano’s Miss Ruki

• Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Good-Bye

• Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven

• Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning

• Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Oba Nickelplating Factory

william leonard

2025 has been my first unbroken year as an artist who is employed at not being an artist. College is long over, and I now live back home, quietly saving and enjoying my job, having less to talk about, but more to feel glad about; more of a life to look at. I’ve felt the barrier between my real and virtual lives grow more solid than ever, yet easier to handle; the social halves of myself now perhaps at their most even-handed. I have had a nicely compartmentalised year.

I’ve tried to make the most of my corporate lulls and late-train nights—I’ve read a lot of new books, and heard a lot of old albums (both on my phone). I even watched a film or a show if enough friends begged or dragged me to it—progress! None of the people on my list below are new to me this year, but I have finally been able to give them the undivided presence in my world that each has long deserved.

I don’t see myself changing much next year (at least not for the worse), but I will try to travel more. I also want to give more back to the internet than the odd postcard-to-the-family I feel myself slipping towards by now. I want to talk more about my friends in one group with my friends in another group, and make something cool happen. I want to make things for my friends that they love, and pay them even more to do the same.

This is all to say that getting to draw for Shy’s blog was a joyful little epitome of who I want to be from now on—including when I sent the article to Tomo Takino’s dub VA on Discord and she enjoyed it a lot. (Not sure I ever mentioned that?) Thank you so much!

Artists That Meant a Lot to Me This Year (and the Next)

• William T. Vollmann — The first I heard of this writer was when a friend started reading You Bright and Risen Angels last year and could hardly describe to me how batshit it was. Vollmann has been the greatest literary discovery of my adult life, and I have now read almost everything he’s written (save his short stories). A titan of maximalism in page count, prose theatrics, scrupulous research, and humanity-spanning empathy. He has worn his heart on his sleeve in more parts of this world than I can count, and lived to tell a thousand tales. The Dying Grass was the most grueling book I read this year; The Royal Family was the most disgusting; Carbon Ideologies was the most depressing; all of them are singular masterpieces I would gladly read again. I will try to finish all his books in time for his next novel in March: A Table for Fortune, a four-volume, 3,700-page CIA family-drama epic. Wish me luck!

• Ben Coniguliaro — Home recording artist and transcendent chordsmith. Released two albums this year, Tactile Demons and Correct Irregulars, which together place him among the best musicians of my generation. His one-man-band Wippy Bonstack purveys DIY prog par excellence: there is seemingly nothing he can’t pull off, instrumental pyrotechnics and alchemical popwork alike, with such unerring infectious panache it makes me want to make music more than anything else. I cannot, and may never manage to, recommend him enough.

• Ryan Power — Home recording artist and transcendent chordsmith. One of my favourite songwriters alive; all his tunes have enough quiet magisterial craft and kooky bedroom lovability to fill a curriculum. Released a song every six weeks of (most of) 2025, to almost no one’s fanfare but mine. One of them, “Drunk Yogi,” might be the defining song of his past decade: a dizzying diorama of bizarro-sophisti-pop perfection which you should spin if you haven’t been spun by him yet!

• Ljot Swanhild — If I’m adding a VTuber to this list, I should probably pick one that’s like absolutely no other—and yet embodies the incipient spirit of the medium closest of all. Ljot Swanhild does not livestream, or have a Discord, or even really play games more than twice a year these days (usually either skate games or train sims). What she does is upload tiny fast-paced videos starring herself as an ever-increasing band of alter-ego friends, hanging out on virtual trains across the German Alps, trying out sick skate tricks, playing industrial DJ sets, and sharing quiet, introspective, even loving moments with each other. But these don’t feel like tacky Lore Content in the slightest: Ljot’s work is sincerely (intra?)personal, her editing always free and fun, no audience implied or expected; she is a YouTuber in the purest sense, of a time when nobody knew what a YouTuber (or VTuber) had to be except “yourself.”

• SimCard StyleGAN / Next Year’s Snow / 7FORM — This winter I got to do one of my favourite activities with these very special friends: record some bullshit narration for their insane avant-rap tragicomedies. I feel so lucky to have fallen in with Octa Möbius Sheffner’s merry band of weirdass Bandcampers, and to have witnessed the gang’s relentless immaturation into genuine best-at-what-they-doers year after year. (Also my favourite people on earth to chat about books with.) Just released the aforementioned avant-rap tragicomedy ÆTHERIST III: A Tale of Two Phones, which is 16 hours long and stars my intrepid besties freestyling their way through an alternate-universe Quebec independence war while also trying to kill Moby. (I might be the very first thing you’ll hear on this album and for that I take full responsibility.)

• Lydia MacBride — My best friend from college. Cuneiform enthusiast, Jungist junglist, and multimedia force of nature. I want more people to read the masterpiece of Irish post-Internet art that is An Tionscadal Dromchla so I’m linking that first. This year she dropped some jams, started a hardcore EDM group (watch this space!) and moved from Dublin to within a single train stop’s distance from me, so I’m hyped to hang out with her more! We also just saw the European premiere of Castration Movie II and had a blast.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Another year in the rearview and I don’t know how to process it all. Lots of travel, lots of shows, lots of film, lots of kissing. Another year well lived.

Favorite Concerts of 2025

1. Aaron Dilloway at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 3/14

2. Los Kjarkas at the Copernicus Center in Chicago + Billy Woods at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 11/13

3. Michael Rother at the Mill & Mine in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/29

4. The Saami Brothers at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 4/6

5. [Ahmed] at Regas Square in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28 + 3/29

6. PinkPantheress at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/2

7. Still House Plants at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 3/25 + The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

8. Cindy Lee at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/5

9. Hetta at Barlos in Barcelos for SQUARE Fest, 1/30

10. Erika de Casier, Fine at Outset in Chicago, 10/21

11. Yasuaki Shimizu, Macie Stewart/Lia Kohl/Whitney Johnson at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 3/24

12. BBBBBBB, RXM Reality, Anti-Soul Organization, etc. at Tritriangle in Chicago, 2/15

13. Helena Hauff at Into the Woods in Los Angeles, 11/8

14. Maria Chàvez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen at The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

15. Xavi at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/28

16. Mk.gee at the Metro in Chicago, 8/1

17. Ichiko Aoba, Gia Margaret at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 5/6

18. Fareed Ayaz & Abu Muhammad Qawwal at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 10/26

19. Claire Rousay, Ami Dang at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, 12/6

20. Dijon at the Salt Shed in Chicago, 12/8

21. William Hooker & Alan Braufman at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 9/19

22. Geese, Racing Mount Pleasant at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 10/15 + Cameron Winter at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago, 12/17

23. Fidju Kitxora at Praça Mercado in Famalicão for SQUARE Fest, 1/31

24. OsamaSon at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 10/25

25. Autechre at Concord Music Hall in Chicago, 10/20

26. Lia Kohl (with Dorothy Carlos, Zachary Good, Gerrit Hatcher, Riley Leitch, Nick Meryhew, Beth McDonald, Zach Moore, Jason Stein, and Macie Stewart) at Union Station’s Great Hall in Chicago, 5/15 + Macie Stewart at Constellation in Chicago, 4/3

27. Eliana Glass with Luke Bergman at Metrograph in New York, 12/13

28. Taekjoon Kim, Hong Junpyo, Sunjae Lee and Kikanju Baku at Dotolim in Seoul, 9/11

29. Mount Eerie at Thalia Hall in Chicago + Pictoria Vark at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 4/13

30. Nino Paid, BabyChiefDoIt, VonOff1700, Jorjiana, and Warhol.ss at Schubas Tavern in Chicago, 4/7

31. Asmâa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou at Theatro Circo in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 2/1

32. Ira Glass at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/17

33. Brìghde Chaimbeul with Shazad Ismaily at the Knoxville Museum of Art for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

34. TWICE at Grant Park in Chicago for Lollapalooza, 8/2

35. Che at the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, 9/27

36. De Schuurman at Cinemas Bragashopping in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 1/31

37. OHYUNG, Anne Ishii x Clint Takeda at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, 4/19

38. Xaviersobased, Ksuuvi at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago, 12/7

39. Matana Roberts at the Stone in New York, 7/9

40. Josephine Foster at Constellation in Chicago, 4/10

mercedes

In retrospect, the word of my year is “impossible”. My year started with the certainty that I was locked in with my circumstances; a restaurant cook in Los Angeles, single, thirties, caretaker for an aging and disabled parent. They could be worse, all-in. There’s a job I’m good at, a place to live in a city I love living in, enough to eat, a bit of time for friends and the people in my care living a good-enough life. Good-enough was my gold standard. My heart, as I age into my thirties, couldn’t really bear any ambitions more complex than the next couple weeks, and there are joys to be found in that kind of doldrums. Visits with friends, the odd creative fulfillment of the rare finished project, the beauty of a sunset, drives in LA’s deeply cinematic nights… but the fact is that the pace of living asked of me by such a hard, big, lonely, competitive city had been wearing me down, slowly, for some time. I was beginning to feel less “locked in” and more “trapped.”

What to do? Aspire for less? Wouldn’t it be greedy to think of something else, some other way to live? Am I just sad because I’m getting old? Wouldn’t it take too much to change it all around? Wouldn’t it all feel like giving up on everything I’ve ever known? Thinking about it at all introduced me to a squall of doubts so severe that imagining myself with my future in my own hands brought tears to my eyes. I could take care of anything but myself. For the first time since my teen years, I felt lost and ineffectual, with the certainty things had to change but no way to know what to do.

My way of getting through involved dusting off an old habit from those teen years: watching a lot of movies. It turns out a lot of the loneliest, loveliest people I know are down for a screening, and the silent presence of someone who cares, joining me in going to another time and place, eased my heart a lot. God help me, I even became a member of the American Cinematheque. Disgusting. As much as I disavow all that the word “escapism” connotes, it’s pretty obvious to me that film’s appeal to me in this passage of life is a way to look at myself again, in other words or another frame of mind. In a movie I can see myself without looking at myself.

Much has happened, and through lots of luck, determination, vulnerability and favor-begging that the blogosphere doesn’t need to learn about, I’m ending this year in a new city, far away from home, but surrounded by love, on a new life/career track, with my caregiving intact and a new lease on life. It’s odd, and terrifying, and exciting. I have an impossible number of people to thank, an impossible ambition to fulfill, an impossible dream coming ever-so-slightly true. I try now to see myself with the sympathy of the cinematographer and the intent of the improviser; let’s see how this all goes! For you, I humbly submit a themed list of recommended viewing.

Top Five Movies I Watched This Year That Feel Like Moving Away from Los Angeles

• Love & Pop (dir. Hideaki Anno, 1998) — When I heard last year that GKIDS had acquired a new 4K restoration of Love & Pop, I figured that my (extremely) longstanding plans to finally watch this one could wait another month or two. It was true serendipity to wait until juuust after my life plans began to completely change, in the company of old friends, friends I no longer get to hang around with quite so casually, at multiple states’ distance. Love & Pop plays like the evil twin of Anno’s masterpiece Kare Kano (don’t @ me); a sublime touch-and-go for the defraying of young social energy in the acid of adult context, and as an extremely non-teenaged woman, it managed to put me in the whip siphon and re-carbonate every ugly precocious emotion in me like a peroxide bath. It’s only uphill from here, right?

• Buffalo ‘66 (dir. Vincent Gallo, 1998) — LMAO, oh boy, oh man, oh goodness. Everything they say about it is true! But: what a bizarre tapestry it weaves in its neurosis, how true it is. So much of this year, I’ve felt like Billy Brown, neurotically stinging at all stimuli like I’ve been shorn of skin, completely histrionic. Full rooms, empty rooms, rooms I’ve been in a million times, rooms I can never revisit; I’ve filled them all with my trembling and tears and my terror at being known. Yet I too have been sunk in the arms of love, slowly dropping my protest, finding my way to stillness. It doesn’t come easy. You can’t ever take it for granted.

• Divine Hammer (dirs. the M. sisters, 2025) — Yeah, yeah, I understand that dropping a movie in this list that you couldn’t have possibly seen if you weren’t in Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA, on the 15th of December has an air of “nyeh-nyeh” to it, but trust me: it’s appointment viewing when it comes to your town. I can’t, I won’t, spoil what makes it such a complete brain-buzz, why and how it’s got my step full of vigor, why I left such a gruesome movie grinning ear-to-ear, why I felt that art with your little cadre of weirdos is a fundamental love in life. All I can say: at your earliest convenience, consider double-featuring with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans!

• Elevator Girls in Bondage (dir. Michael Kalmen, 1972) — Maybe I’m the problem, thinking about queer cinema every June like it’s homework. Once I get into the swing, it’s typically the most enrichment I have in a single month of viewing, and often the most directly fun. But of course, there’s always the little worry in a modern moment of movement dissolution that yesterday’s queer cohort is today’s crab bucket, and that as a shrill queen, there might be no cinema in my past such as I need, that I might be the bearer of bad optics. Thank god for this burning downhill dumpster of bad taste, so radically unrepentant in its bubbly communistic t-slurdom that it makes Pink Flamingos look like Dallas. It’s not really a fair comparison, I guess; this is literally “pornography” on a technicality. Anyway, this is what hanging out in Seattle feels like.

• Celine and Julie Go Boating (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1974) — It took my dear friends describing Rivette’s film Le Pont du Nord as “French Kamen Rider” to convince me to watch my first Rivette, and it worked on me because I am a simple creature with an easily plied mind. About a year later, I can say that Rivette is one of My Guys, as surely as Yang or Murnau or Weerasthekul or Cheang or Araki, and I’d like Celine and Julie Go Boating in any other year. In this year, to say that I love it, when all its implications of the theatrical, life-changing magic of friendship amongst women in opposition to all narrative gravity have seemed to manifest under me like warm winds… this isn’t a melodrama anymore. Dance a tango out the front door of the cold grey house. Cry if you must; we have a current to row against!

Kei

On August 3rd, 2025 voice actress Asakura Azumi, performing as 765 Production’s Hagiwara Yukiho, struggled through tears singing the solo track “Plumeria Flower” at the second day of THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS LIVE ～NEVER END IDOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!～. On her Wikipedia page, Asakura, whose frustration with her own tears was evident through the entirety track, is noted with a remark from a DVD release dated back to 2007 as “being often overwhelmed with emotions to the point of crying on stage.” Asakura’s blog posts are often self-derisive and occasionally self-dismissive. None of this is an act for her performing as Yukiho, an idol who cries often and has little in the way of self confidence. A post Asakura made about the 2-day August event details how amazing she feels the cast around her have been, and rarely does she give herself any credit.

When giving her final comment of the performance, she stated that the selection of *Plumeria Flower* as her solo had been her own idea, as she felt the song best represented her feelings that she would not have been able to make it this far on her own. Her voice quivering, obviously welling up with tears, she comments on her performance of the song: “But it turns out I couldn’t sing it. I still have some work to put in.” and, breaking into laughter, states “I guess I can’t quit yet.”

I had a difficult year. I found myself experiencing emergencies and unfortunate news, both personally and professionally, on more occasions than I’d have preferred. Several months felt like an eternity. Several months bled together in what I can only describe as chaos, where my memories of good times several months apart feel as though they all occurred in a single jumbled mess. The good times were ultimately an escape from the processing of thoughts and feelings I felt I did not have time for anyhow. “Just do your best” is what I have always been told, and without guidance that becomes a machine in perpetual motion.

Utilizing that perpetual motion, I drove myself to work on music with more intensity. I spent an ungodly amount of my downtime watching tutorials, learning music theory, and recreating parts of songs that I was inspired by to learn how they work. Listing these out like I just did sounds so productive, but it was really an endlessly frustrating solitary activity that likely reduced the physical capacity of my eyes by a non-negligible degree. After spending months on a particular project, I continue to feel unhappy with the end product, which is equally as depressing as it remains to be motivating. While the project is exactly what I wanted to do, it is impossible to ignore the fact that I tend to rush when the finish line is in sight, and that never results in an output I could call my best. I suppose the only thing left to say is “I still have some work to put in. I guess I can’t quit yet.”

It was during the same period of constantly putting myself through the gauntlet this summer that I found myself drawn to the hybrid sports/romance visual novel Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue. Though Aokana is about a fictional 1 vs. 1 competitive sport played with anti-gravity equipment, developer Sprite manages to use this framing to distill what it means to love doing something in spite of potential negative emotions, and sends that as an emotional force through its unique subcultural medium. The genre descriptor spokon, described as “anime and manga genre that tells about sports achievements made thanks to the desire to win” absolutely fits Aokana, and in my personal opinion, could be applied to a number of media about idols as well, as music can be a competition individually and collectively. Standing above the rest, my favorite route of the game was centered on the themes of acknowledging your own weaknesses, and moving forward on a path that is impossible with ordinary effort. As though it were decided by the hand of fate, the role of Tobisawa Misaki, the heroine of the route in question, is played by none other than Asakura Azumi. Whether her personality or personal history were a factor in her being cast in the role, I do not know. It still speaks to me.

Failure is not an option, and I intend to keep putting in the work. If only because I feel so strongly about the few times I can escape to live performances that can re-light the fire I know is required to keep going. For this year’s list I have 10 live performances I experienced this year that got me through it.

• Tokyo Dennou from. DENONBU @ Cybertokyo — Trying to take in every screen at once might kill me. The wild bass of Yggdranium may as well be giving me a concussion.

• i☆Ris @ Tokyo Idol Festival 2025 — Standing in a parking lot converted to a stage with zero shade in triple digit August heat, I recall another event where a typical otaku crowd comment, summarized as “is the water tasty” was met by another member of the crowd yelling back “OF COURSE IT’S TASTY WHY WOULDN’T IT BE?” I accidentally picked the corralled area where a group of guys were mixing for the group with more arcane and unique chants than I’ve ever heard in my life. This is nowhere near the most strange place I have seen i☆Ris, a friend would remind me. Drying up like Spongebob at Sandy’s house is worth it to see my oshi.

• MyGO!!!!! ZEPP TOUR 2025 @ Zepp Nagoya — I may just never apply for floor tickets again after having what felt like front row seats (upper seating area) to a live performance.

• MyGO!!!!!×Ave Mujica Joint Live “Wakaremichi no, Sono Saki e” (Days 1 & 2) — A two day long duel between two extremely talented bands is best remembered in my head by a friend’s comment that “they’re doing metalcore moves over there”

• LAUGH DiAMOND×Yukimoji Two-man Live “Blazing 1v1?! Match~ (Tentative Title)” — An entire room of people dedicated to media mix idol project thought dead and buried years prior are yelling in excitement at a (yet-to-be released at the time) Nintendo Switch 2, running somewhere behind the curtain during a demo of the game. At one point during a talk segment, an audience member interjects to ask the performers if it’s okay if we all sit down on the floor. This was presented initially as a live performance of vocal synth songs by their voice providers, unrelated to any game of any sort. How did we get here?

• Maebashi Witches Live ~OPEN if you wish~ Chapter 4 (Daytime Performance) — Translation of a comment made to me by a group of guys standing next to me when the performers asked who had come the furthest to see this niche regional setting anime idol media mix group: “(laughing) dude, it’s gotta be you right”

• She is Legend @ Heaven Burns Red Live 3.5th Anniversary Festival — I heard “Goodbye Innocence” live and I’m never going to fail.

• MACROSS F GALAXY LIVE☆FINAL 2025 (Day 1) — Who are “May’n” and “Nakajima Megumi”? As far as I am concerned, I saw Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee for real on that night.

• THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS LIVE ～NEVER END IDOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!～ (Day 1) — A man several seats down the row from me spends the entirety of the song “Yakusoku” sobbing into his towel, never once looking up. That night I am discussing my decision to skip Day 2 for another performance, and will regret uttering the words, “God, if they play” (the song that is titled) “MUSIC♪ tomorrow, I’m going to kill myself”

• MACROSS F GALAXY LIVE☆FINAL 2025 (Day 2) — Kanno Yoko, rising through the smoke covered stage floor seated at a grand piano. The guy next to me says “masaka” out loud, the only time I think I’ve heard someone say that out loud in person. The keytar she would don after is about as large as herself.

Ryan Waller

My favorite TikTok this year is deeply peaceful, rather than funny. It’s just a handsome man hitting a series of very clean dougies in beautiful natural environments. The video is therapeutic to me. Every time I watch it, every concern and stress evaporates from my mind for a few seconds.

There’s a lot of those two things to go around lately. General life stress saps my strength every day. Like everyone, I bear witness to the plentiful genocides ripping the planet apart. Like everyone, I see the planetary devastation approaching on the horizon. Despite all that shit though, I try my best to take pleasure in plenty of things; the passion and perseverance of my students, the kindness of the people who are patient enough to tolerate me and keep me around, the continued health of my parents.

Below is a list of newly released things (all stuff that came out this year, specifically) that kept me alive and happy in 2025. Not ranked and necessarily incomplete. Here’s to another year on this burning shithole marble.

• Klein - Thirteen Sense

• MIKE - Showbiz!

• Ealuhri - F*** THE ***** ‘-’, EALUHRI VS. LUHRIRE

• Tiakola & Genezio - FARA FARA GANG

• Shemar - Emerge N’See

• Hester Valentine - I Am the Female Weezy

• Snotnoze Saleem - A River Dies pf Thirst

• ByoNoiseGenerator - Subnormal Dives

• The Residents - Doctor Dark

• Yellow Eyes - Confusion Gate

• KeiyaA - Hooke’s Law

• The Sidepieces - Darkskin Niggas with Lightskin Nigga Problems

• Celestaphone & Dealers of God - Cult Subterranea

• Zayok - In Elsewhere

• billy woods - Golliwog/Gowillog

• Everything is Psychedelic - The Beautiful Malaise

• The Hatch - 333

• Jalen Elk Star - Esin

• KP Skywalka - I Tried to Tell You

• Nuvolascura - How This All Ends

• Ostraca - Eventualities

• Pulciperla - Tatekieto

• Homeskin - Soul Washed Bleach

• Veilburner - Longing for Tragedy, Reeking of Triumph

• Sumac & Moor Mother - The Film

• Tantric Bile - A Medusa on Your House

• Phyllomedusa - The Dark Side of the Amazon

• Ben Bondy - XO Salt Llif3

• All Men Unto Me - Requiem

• JJJJJerome Ellis - Vesper Sparrow

• Makaya McCraven - Off the Record

Patrick Lynn Wilson

2025 is best described in terms of blueberries and blue corn chips eaten while riding shotgun in a car. Allow me to explain.

As a plurality of the USA will tell you, 2025 was a Hell Year. The past decade has been an awful ride, but in 2025 the wheels fully fell off. If the thunder doesn’t catch you, then the lightning will; if the lightning fails to steal you, then the masked secret police will attempt as much of your person. Hunting for solace in pop culture’s past, I assumed the project of watching all 325 episodes of Norman Lear’s offbeat soap opera satire from 1976, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. And as an alternatingly proud and bashful Deadhead for half of my life thus far, I turned to the lasting jam band scene they bequeathed for a welcome distraction from Hell.

Before long, I grasped that the current jam scene in America contains something closer in spirit to that vibe infusing those dank DIY venues dedicated to hardcore, noise, and avant-garde happenings that formed me when I was younger (RIP to The Mopery!) More risk-taking than many assume; more willing to experiment with tradition, with sights set on the outer limits of what rock does when liberated. On July 27^th, the instantly infamous Phish show at Saratoga Springs’ SPAC, where the band played in reverse, launching with a reprise incessantly returned to at least 6 times throughout the evening, coalesced for me the jigsaw pieces of a puzzle where post-motorik psychedelic rock music truly makes sense while never settling for that coherence. If you squint at the right angle during a heady guitar solo, the phantom of Les Rallizes Denudes’ Takashi Mizutani may appear in your peripheral vision. And if you think that a band is teasing the Mii Channel theme during the intro bars of “Bennie and the Jets,” they are. Is it any surprise that Phish now incorporates a Miku Stomp pedal in their setup?

A particular highlight of the year was seeing the mighty Grateful Dead cover project Joe Russo’s Almost Dead at Chicago’s Salt Shed in October. As with most concerts this year, I found genuine new friends in the process—here, a 50-something-year-old government shutdown-furloughed white dude from Arkansas who became my show partner and best friend for the night, regaling me with recollections of setlists and venue rankings of the 27 Dead shows he saw over a 3-year span. Though we were separated, he waited for me outside to offer a ride home, but not before we took a long breather seated in that parking lot to snack on his choice of concert snacks: blueberries and blue corn chips. This gesture has affected me endlessly since. One may assume a posture in music for validation; or one can practice loving kindness and treat each new person in life as worthy of having a bag of blue corn chips passed to them.

In 2026, I encourage you to envision yourself as both the driver and the passenger riding in this car containing blueberries and blue corn chips; our love and care for each other may well be the best way to make it through the rest of this ride.

One potential balm in 2025 and ahead to heal the grievous wounds caused by the streaming era is through application of the overwhelming richness of live musical recordings available for listening through Archive.org and Bandcamp. When streaming services fund little bits of war fashioned specifically to hurt people, the incentive to turn off, tune in, and drop out via disconnecting entirely from the hydralike beast of streaming proves all the more appealing.

Below are 5 live recordings—some bootlegs from audience members in the taper’s section, others sourced directly by the artists themselves—which provided an escape route from the morass of 2025 for yours truly, and suggest a more immediate path towards interfacing with bands and their community:

1. Phish - 07/27/2025 @ SPAC, Saratoga Springs, New York

2. Sqwerv - 10/01/2025 @ The B. Bar, Omaha, Nebraska

3. Dogs in a Pile - 11/20/2025 @ Garcia’s Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

4. Goose - 08/28/2025 @ Hancher Auditorium, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa

5. Dwelling Unit - dwelling_unit_april_2025_VHS_footage; 04/26/2025 @ Special Features, Portland, Oregon

aspalas

In my head, I’m always writing. But writing has come difficult as late. This year saw a feature of mine published in Unsanctioned Recollection, a zine dedicated to exploring the subject of emulation and its relationship to memory. I’ve considered journaling or starting a diary too many times to count, but I don’t have the self-discipline. I compromised another way: in lieu of signing up for another website, I write down games I’ve played, books I’ve read, shows I watched in an Excel file. (Letterboxd is my sole exception.) Even if I haven’t written anything that week—or devastatingly, month—I tell myself": “It’s okay. You did something.” The title of whatever it is jogs my memory; proof to myself that I’ve read someone’s writing; that my time was not spent unwisely.

But it’s still not mine. I grieve for the time I wish I could just do it.

That time is far and few between now. I think of when I would excitedly type out whatever in Word ’98 or in a Notepad file on my dad’s work-issued Thinkpad. My initial writing was saved on several 3½-inch Floppy Disks, still stored in a handsome study desk drawer in our living room. An example of an early work: a short story (certainly no more than 2 pages, single spaced) involving a stuffed animal and my younger brother’s classmate going on an adventure. The details are ostensibly trapped in 1.44MB of hardware. It’s funny to still recall the general outline of such a silly story.

Yet, when I think about the time and place I was writing, reshaped to fit a kid’s perspective on the process, it’s difficult for me to recall details. I tried keeping a diary, inspired by characters in children’s books who did just that, but I found it tedious and would stop after a few days. If I had taken fastidious notes on my life, what would that reveal? Teen angst, anxiety, academic pressure—I don’t need specific memory for those, though; they still simmer under my flesh today. Just the notion of forgetting details of my life has caused an unsettling feeling in my stomach. I ask questions to myself: How could you forget that? Did you not care enough to remember? I’ve been told before I have a “selective” memory, usually in the case of when I’ve done something I shouldn’t have. I’ve been upset at myself for not remembering the minutiae of details—what someone likes, their birthday, some other piece of trivia I scold myself for not committing to memory. I should know it, but I don’t. I try, though. I’ll do better next time. When someone asks, “Do you remember when…?” my response has been: Honestly, I don’t. It’s normal to forget things, I tell myself, while sinking into a typical wish of how I want to remember.

I wonder if I owe it to the person I was to remember details not necessarily lost, but what my mind misplaced. Was that memory, that event, that casual remark so important? Maybe it’s a kindness to my current self to not recall the anxiety and anger of my formative years—with my family, my friends, and my own growing pains. Some games I played this year—No Case Should Remain Unsolved, ICO, the Fatal Frame series, Kanon, and Death Stranding: On the Beach—examined the concept of memories and relationships in ways that reminded me of my own Unsanctioned Recollection piece. Ghosts who don’t want to be forgotten will force you to remember. That some memories may try to fade, but against all odds, they’ll come back to you. A memory so strong it transcends life and death. These mediums have spoken to me, and thus I write: Don’t forget how this made you feel.

Circling back to the beginning of this, I think that’s why I—and so many of us—write. We want to capture the intangible—an experience, a feeling—and pin it down on the page: a thought made eternal. “I like to remember things my own way,” Bill Pullman’s character says in a way of explanation in David Lynch’s 1995 neo-noir Lost Highway, when questioned about his disdain for video camcorders. “How I remembered them, not necessarily how they happened.” Memory helps shape us, but does not define us. We—or at least, I’ll try to, keep 2025’s memory close, but paradoxically, welcome the next year with open arms.

In lieu of any resolutions, because I can’t keep that steadfast either, next year I want to do an equal amount of thinking and writing—physical, of course.

Thank you to the zine organizer, Game&Burger, for giving the collective Us the creative freedom to just Be. Thank you to all my friends and family that helped me in ways that only the heart can see. And thank you Shy, for giving me one more chance to get some writing in before the chapter closes on 2025. Here’s to another year; for everyone still here, and everyone we’ll carry with us.

Top 5 animals I rescued in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach’s post-apocalyptic Australia:

1. Emu

2. Koala

3. Echidna

4. Bilby

5. Wombat

Shy Clara Thompson

Why is it so embarrassing to want better for yourself? Why does gesturing toward the life you want feel like the one thing you’re not allowed to do? For the last fourteen years, I’ve lived in the same city, in the same apartment. Most of that time, it was fine. I lived here with my partner, who I was comfortable with. As long as she was also content, I was happy to plant my roots here. A couple of years ago, we decided to amicably split. It wasn’t a dramatic event; it had simply become impossible not to acknowledge that our hearts had grown apart. It didn’t lead to much practical change, at first. This apartment is big enough for both of us. We still share most of our things. We have a cat that we raised from kittenhood together. We’re still pretty good friends. The lack of sudden moves, I thought, would be a gentle on-ramp that would get me accustomed to an inevitable change. These days, it’s causing me nothing but pain.

This place isn’t a home anymore. It’s become a museum. It’s an interactive shrine to more than a decade of life shared with someone else, a never-ending stream of sense memories that transport me right to the threshold of feelings that are no longer accessible. The bed we used to sleep in together is only occupied by me now, and I still sleep on the side that I’ve always slept on. The empty space is heavy like a neutron star, pulling me toward the center as I cling to my familiar crevice in defiance of the laws of gravity. What’s stopping me from unfurling my body to stretch out a little bit?

This year, I’ve been splitting my time more between the eastern half of Washington and the west. The first time I buried myself in the uncomfortable seat of a Greyhound bus to stay a few days with a friend, I was afraid. I didn’t travel often because I was prone to nasty motion sickness. I spent the entirety of a five hour commute holding down the contents of my stomach, unable to glance out of the window and take in the scenery. I doubted I’d be able to have any fun once I arrived. I wondered if I was being selfish for earmarking four days for myself, even though I didn’t have anything important to do back home. Turning an eye to something else, I thought, was giving up. I felt guilty.

The more accustomed I got to making the trip, the less my body protested. I looked forward to having uninterrupted time to paw through a book I’d left neglected on my shelf, or to queue up four or five albums to listen to on my Sansa Clip Zip—one of my favorite pieces of technology because it only does the thing I love doing the most. My tolerance for being whipped around on winding roads gradually increased, and I was finally able to enjoy the view. The way the flat plains of Spokane bunched up into peaks and valleys as I approached the Cascade mountains felt like looking at my heart activity on an electrocardiogram; I was spinning back to life like Frankenstein’s monster as I neared closer to a place where someone was happy to see me.

Still, I don’t quite feel like I’m clear to do anything I want to do. After more than two years of nursing my heartbreak, I was sheepishly able to ask someone out on a date. I felt awkward, I stumbled, and I missed every social cue because I forgot what it felt like to be in the company of someone making an honest effort to get closer to me. I had grown too accustomed to my daily reality of being around a person that adds a few millimeters of distance every day. It was fun, but was it okay? Am I allowed to say “I’d like to see you again”? With any hope, I’ll stop pre-empting my emotional needs with arguments for why they’re impossible to fulfill. Rather than trying to divine if someone wants my company, I suppose I can just trust what they tell me.

So to whom it may concern: let’s hang out again sometime? 💜

Five books I read on my various five hour bus commutes

• Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano

• 투명한 남자 (Transparent Man) by Sim Daeseop

• Popocomi 1 by various artists, curated by Popotame Book Gallery

• Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the Transpacific by Kevin Fellezs

• Creating Enka: “The Soul of Japan” in the Postwar Era by Wajime Yusuke, translated by Kato David Hopkins (RIP)

Five albums that sound good on my fourteen year-old mp3 player

• killwiz - Schizophrenia

• Tsukino Mito - 310PHz

• Gabby Pahinui - Pure Gabby

• Utah Kawasaki - Static Pulse

• ex. happyender girl - girls chronicle (2020-2024)

Thanks for reading this fourteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Don’t have too much to say. I bled my heart out already. I’ll be getting on a bus and spending my birthday in the company of friends pretty much right after I hit publish. I need a vacation, and by golly I’m taking one.

If you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. It’s my birthday. Work’s been slow and it’s been hard to find gigs, so it helps me live! As ever: don’t ask how old I am! Seventeen plus an undisclosed number.

Considering doing more regular posts in the new year. Maybe monthly roundups of albums I liked? (In addition to the stuff I normally post.) Would y’all like that? Lemme know.

See you soon. Happy new year. Kiss kiss.

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P.S. I passed the time writing and editing this post by listening to One Loop Beyond (2013, expanded edition 2018) by WOODMAN.

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For a long time, it felt like the history of vocal synth was being forgotten. Hatsune Miku, the official mascot of the Vocaloid software (and the unofficial mascot of essentially all music made with voice synthesis), remained popular. She’s a recognizable presence in anime, music, visual art, and video game fandom, acting as a connective tissue for every disparate corner of otaku culture. She performed at Coachella. She’s in Fortnite. You can run your instrument through an effects pedal that makes your guitar sound like her. But there’s an entire supporting cast in the vocal synth universe that, as time marches on, has fallen out of the conversation. It’s not that the knowledge of these other characters has been lost—herculean community efforts like the Vocaloid Database and Vocaloid, UTAU, and SynthV wikis have more information about obscure characters and voicebanks than you could read in a lifetime—but they were simply not capturing the interest of younger creative people developing new interest in vocal synth.

On July 13th, 2008, vocal synth producer LamazeP published the song “Triple Baka,” along with an accompanying music video he animated himself. Joining Miku are two other characters, coded red and yellow, complementing Miku’s pale blue motif with a triumvirate of primary colors. The upbeat denpa-inspired song would prove popular on Japanese streaming site Niconico (formerly Nico Nico Douga), becoming an early viral vocal synth hit and helping to popularize the two virtual idols flanking Miku on either side. But who are they? Kasane Teto and Akita Neru, conceived as parodies of Miku, have similar but distinct origin stories. Until fairly recently, it felt like “Triple Baka” would be the peak of their respective popularities—but both of them have managed, against long odds, to make what seemed like an impossible comeback. Tracing the mythology of each member of the trio individually, a pretty solid record of vocal synth fandom starts to take shape. So starting from least to most obscure, let’s examine the history of the Triple Baka.

Hatsune Miku

In 2004, the first Vocaloid program was released by Yamaha. It’s a vocal synthesizer software that could convert lyrics and melodic input into “singing” via pre-configured voicebanks. Like existing speech synthesis software of the time (think classic Microsoft Sam), recorded voices from a real person are used as a model to develop a virtual singer. The earliest Vocaloid voicebanks, Leon and Lola, were only compatible with English speech and their voice providers are still unknown. It was an interesting but niche piece of software that was only used by a limited number of digital music enthusiasts.

Then, in 2007, everything changed. Yamaha partner Crypton Future Media, who were already in the business of creating sound libraries and BGM collections, internally developed their own voicebank for the improved Vocaloid 2. Their original character, Hatsune Miku, wasn’t just a disembodied voice like previous iterations. They commissioned the famous voice actress Saki Fujita to provide vocals, and manga artist Kei Garo created an illustration of an android pop idol with flowing blue hair. She immediately resonated with bedroom producers and visual artists alike; they created new works and shared them on Nico Nico Douga, which launched only the year prior. It was the frontier of a new fandom, using new technology, being distributed on a new platform.

The marriage of music and visual was always an important aspect of vocal synth. Supercell, one of the first breakout Vocaloid artists, uploaded their first single “Melt” to NND featuring a striking original illustration of Miku by the artist 119—used without permission. Following the unexpected popularity of the song, ryo (the producer for Supercell), messaged 119 to apologize for grabbing their art without asking. From then on, a partnership was formed and Supercell became a collective of artists and producers. As Vocaloid started to gain international attention and spread to sites like YouTube, that culture persisted. (Morii Kenshirou, a flash animator who made a name for himself providing visuals for Vocaloid songs by siinamota, 40mp, and DECO*27, would go to work on mainstream anime productions like Fullmetal Alchemist.)

Crypton would continue to push Miku as the face of their flagship product, but they didn’t have to market her very aggressively; creative folks naturally wanted to use her as an avatar for their projects due to her lack of any canon characteristics. She had a stated age of sixteen, but it was also encouraged that she could be aged up or down. She doesn’t have any lore to speak of, either. Miku would become almost like a folk hero, malleable and able to transform into whatever best suits the expression of the person telling her story. This flexibility would ultimately extend to other vocal synth characters, with the most common recurring themes being decided by the fandom and, in some cases, acknowledged in a more “official” capacity. (The famous depiction of her holding a green onion, for example, comes from a fan cover of the Finnish song “Ievan Polkka” in which she’s drawn waving around a vegetable.) She’s whatever you need her to be.

Kasane Teto

Teto was conceptualized as an April fools prank by users of the Japanese 2channel message board in 2008. In response to Miku’s rapid ascent, a spoof of her design was created to trick Vocaloid fans into believing a new character was coming. Teto bears a strong resemblance to Miku (her clothes, especially, are almost identical) but the iconic aqua color scheme was swapped out for a deep red and the long twintails were replaced by a pair of tightly coiled ringlets. A “04” tattoo adorned her left shoulder, referencing what would have been her status as Crypton Future Media’s fourth character in the Vocaloid series. (Miku is 01, the twins Kagamine Rin and Len are 02, and Megurine Luka is 03.) Later iterations of her design have changed this to “0401,” or April 1st—the date of her birth. She was given a voice, provided by Mayo Oyamano. Her “official” art, illustrated by Sen (線), was close enough to Crypton’s early Miku art to fool enough people.

Despite never being intended to be anything other than a joke, interest in Teto persisted and she started acquiring genuine fans. Her voice was recorded again to make a voicebank in the shareware vocal synth software UTAU, and producers immediately got to work making original songs. (One of these early songs, “Kasane Territory,” poked a little fun at the fact that Miku’s voicebank would set you back nearly 16,000 yen while Teto was free for everyone.) A doujin circle called TWINDRILL was even created to manage and market the character.

Teto would receive nods of official acknowledgement here and there, but it was mostly nothing substantial. She was added into the Project Diva 2nd rhythm game, but only as a cosmetic skin. You could see her singing and dancing, but the voice coming out of her mouth was still Miku’s. (Fans on Nico Nico Douga and YouTube would create cover versions of songs in Project Diva with Teto’s voice and pair them with visuals from the game so it almost felt like the real thing.) Wataru Sasaki, the engineer who created Hatsune Miku’s voice in Vocaloid, tried his hand at replicating Teto for the official software in 2012, but couldn’t get it right and the project was scrapped.

It wasn’t until 2023, when Oyamano was tapped to record new vocals for Synthesizer V Studio, that Teto finally received an air of legitimacy. Alongside this voicebank for the Vocaloid competitor software, Teto received a refreshed design that did away with her references to Miku. Finally, she looked like herself. Similar to UTAU, SynthV is more accessible than Vocaloid with a variety of cheaper options and free voicebanks. Unlike UTAU, though, it’s much easier to use. This combination of increased visibility for Teto and easier software to get your head around led to an explosion in popularity. Younger producers that were less attached to Miku were particularly charmed by her. For the first time, some of the most ubiquitous vocal synth songs featured Teto (both instead of and in addition to Miku). In a surprising reversal, one of the Teto’s biggest recent songs, “Tetoris,” was being covered by Miku instead of the other way around—and the Vocaloid poster child’s version was far less popular.

Akita Neru

Whereas Teto was conceived as a bit of fun, Neru was born from a conspiracy theory that got out of hand. In late 2007, as Vocaloid was quickly spreading throughout the Japanese internet, it was enough of a phenomenon that television programs were running stories about the new cultural sensation. One characterized the Miku faithful as “jobless anime freaks,” which didn’t sit well with the nerds on 2chan. In the coming days after this negative piece, images of Miku disappeared from Google search results and the Japanese language Wikipedia page for the fictional idol disappeared. Naturally, netizens figured, this must have been the work of a shadowy agency actively coordinating to erase an emerging otaku trend from existence.

Speculation about why someone might want to quietly delete Miku raged on the message board for days, and of course, the threads attracted the attention of people that just wanted to troll. A deluge of messages with some variation of the phrase 「飽きた、寝る」(TL: I’m bored, going to sleep) appeared, which the channers dismissed as agitators on sock puppet accounts. Eventually, it would surface that the search results were a temporary server-side error and the Wikipedia page was removed due to a claim over copyrighted assets. Still, the timing seemed suspicious and some people continued believing there was a real anti-Miku mafia.

Inspired by this bizarre flare-up, illustrator Smith Hioka designed an inverted Miku persona. Her outfit resembles her counterpart, though her accent color is a bright yellow. Her hair is fashioned into one long side ponytail instead of two. In place of Miku’s friendly demeanor, Neru’s face is twisted into a permanent scowl and she’s brandishing two cell phones—one clutched tightly in her hand and the other in a holster on her thigh—that she uses to make hateful posts about Miku at all hours of the day. She would be named Akita Neru (亞北ネル), which reads phonetically identical to the message being spammed by the Miku-hating trolls.

Neru gained a modest following as a fanloid in the following years, being used as the subject of songs and music videos despite not having a voicebank of her own. Generally, when someone makes a “Neru” song, it’s just Hatsune Miku’s voice—sometimes unaltered, sometimes pitched up an octave. More rarely, it can also be Kagamine Rin pitched down. Similar to Teto, Neru would receive some minor acknowledgement from Crypton in the form of Project Diva cosmetic DLC, which Hioka says he got the opportunity to design himself.

In early January of 2025, producer Hiiragi Magnetite created a song called “Zaako” with the Vocaloid Kaai Yuki as a voicebank. The song attracted a bit of controversy due to the choice of character, with some insisting she was the wrong choice for such a suggestive song because her voice provider was only a fourth grader. Hiiragi quickly pulled the song and set to work “fixing” it, surprising the vocal synth community a month later by replacing the voicebank and having the artist reanimate the entire music video with Akita Neru. Notably, there's a segment where Miku and Teto appear alongside her and Vocaloid fans went insane. 17 years later, the Triple Baka are finally back together. ✿

Thanks for reading this thirteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Wow. I love Vocaloid. Go follow my brilliant oomfie william_ leonard, who drew the incredible header image and makes really cute comics.

If you appreciate the newsletter and want more needlessly in-depth vocal synth history, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. I’m trying to get all my ideas out while I am motivated and having fun writing again. So far so good!

Okay I love you byeeee. 💛💙❤️

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Shoko Uehara, also known as JON, is a musician, tarot reader, and all around interesting person currently residing in Tokyo. She’s most known outside of Japan for her 1996 album Smoke, released on Tzadik as part of the label’s New Japan series highlighting avant-garde music from the island nation. I spoke to Uehara-san on April 10th, 2024 to discuss her music career, pump organs, and why she wears a dog costume when she performs. Junko Okada acted as our interpreter.

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Shy Clara Thompson: How’s your day going?

Shoko Uehara: I just woke up. It’s 8 a.m. in Japan.

Oh! Good morning!

Good morning!

You’re currently on tour, right?

I had a tour in March for about a week. Besides my JON project, I sing French chanson too and was performing that kind of music. Now I’m back in Japan.

Let’s get started! What are some of your earliest memories with music?

My parents didn’t listen to music much. However, when I was in junior high school I got good grades and I asked my parents for a copy of The Beatles’ White Album as my reward. That was my first encounter with music!

When did you start making your own music? Do you remember when you got your first instrument?

I played piano when I was young. My parents were very strict, so I didn’t really enjoy playing music much until I started living by myself. Moving out, I bought a pump organ from a vintage store and that was the first time I started making original music.

What were you listening to when you started making music for yourself? Still the Beatles, or had you gotten into different stuff by then?

At the time I bought my organ, I was listening to The Residents, DEVO, Daniel Johnston, Jad Fair, stuff like that. I wanted to start a digital synth band but I couldn’t find anyone to join me. I decided to go solo. My parents had a dog, and I wrote my first song from the perspective of the dog to express its feelings.

Is this why you wear the dog costume? How much later until that became part of your image?

To express the feeling of a dog, I thought I couldn’t be in a human body—so I decided it was better to dress as a dog. I was also influenced by David Lynch; I liked Twin Peaks and wanted to express the obscure atmosphere of his works when I performed.

So you went solo because you couldn’t find a band. Where did you play your first show?

I had friends in the Tokyo underground scene, so I had opportunities to play at some of the live houses in the area.

Did you find people to play with once you got into that underground scene?

I mostly played by myself, but on my first album I played with Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins.

How did you get into recording? Were you just doing it independently?

When I started, I was just recording myself at home on cassette tapes. There were two magazines that I sent those tapes to, and they ended up liking my recordings. That’s how I got to release my first CD!

Your next album after that was released on John Zorn’s label Tzadik. How did that happen?

I gave my private cassette tapes to Tatsuya Yoshida. At that time, John Zorn was living in Kōenji, Tokyo and Yoshida-san was in contact with him. He passed the tapes along to Zorn and he really liked them, so that’s how I was able to release an album on his label.

Did you know much about Zorn at the time? Did you like his music?

Yes. I listened to his music and got to see him play live. My first international performance was at the Knitting Factory in New York. I was invited there by John Zorn!

What was it like performing outside of Japan for the first time?

I loved it! The feedback was amazing. I got a strong reaction from the audience that I never get in Japan. The American audiences are much more intense.

What are Japanese audiences typically like?

They put on a smile, but they don’t really make any noises or get loud (laughter).

Do you still get to do many shows outside of Japan?

Because of the language barrier I don’t organize international trips by myself, but I’ve been invited to Europe a few times. I’ve recently performed in France and Switzerland!

You mentioned singing chanson earlier. How did you get into that? Is that the type of music you play in France?

She passed away, but the late singer Masako Togawa—a chanson vocalist—used to run a club in Shibuya. I do tarot reading as a side job, and used to do readings at Togawa’s club. I got familiar with chanson music by spending a lot of time there between 2000 and 2010.

I wanted to ask about the tarot readings. I see that you have a website where you post them daily! When did you start doing them?

I started doing them in 1999 and never stopped!

Have you been in touch with Zorn since playing that show in New York?

Not really. He used to release a lot of music from Japanese musicians on his label, but he hasn’t really been doing that very much lately.

By now you’ve worked with a lot of different musicians and done many different genres. When you tour, are you mostly still playing solo or do you ever support other artists?

Once or twice a year I’ll play in a band with other musicians, but it’s usually just me!

I wanted to ask about some studio collaborations that you’ve done. My personal favorite is Inuhiko, your project with the drummer from Gauze. How did the two of you connect?

I met Hiko-san in 2008. He was in Gauze at that time, and he was doing duo projects with lots of other musicians. He suggested that, instead of playing improvised music, he wanted to play drums along to songs I had already written. We released two albums like this.

Do you like the way your songs sound in that hardcore punk context?

Yes, it’s very unique and interesting!

What about your collaboration with Yasushi Utsunomia? That one’s pretty unique too.

The JON project started in 1994, but Satoru Higashiseto, who runs Forever Records in Osaka, organized the recording with Utsunomia-san in 1996.

It’s a pretty unique record for the way it was recorded, isn’t it?

We recorded throughout the year—spring, summer, autumn, winter—and the recording was done outside. We got recordings of cicadas, birds, and other things. We used all the sounds from outside.

Was there any direction from Utsunomia-san or were you given freedom to perform however you wanted?

There was no direction from Utsunomia-san, just suggestions for things I could do that might be interesting.

How did collaborating with him differ from Hiko? What kind of adjustments do you make depending on who you’re collaborating with?

With Utsunomia-san, I just played how I normally do. But since Hiko plays his drums so loud, I had to play my organ loud to match. I cut a hole in the organ and then put a microphone inside so that it wouldn’t be drowned out by the drums.

It seems like you’re singing louder too!

Yes (laughter). I had to sing very loudly!

How do you write your songs?

Most of the time, it comes from humming in my daily life. That’s how I start composing them.

Your music is often described as being like children’s music or nursery rhymes. Do you see it that way?

I’m not consciously trying to make them like nursery rhymes, but it may sound like that because of the way I like to write.

A lot of your songs are about animals. It’s safe to assume you like animals, right?

I’m not good with humans, but I love cats!

One of your albums is about Ochonan-san, your cat. You can even hear him in one of the songs. It’s cute!

Yes, the cat would sometimes sing along with me.

Was that a happy accident, or did you want to include him as part of the record?

I was playing organ at home, and the cat wanted to play with me—so it only seemed right to include him!

What is it about people that make them more difficult to deal with than cats?

(laughter) I’m not good at talking with people unless there’s a shared purpose, like making music together. I generally prefer to spend time by myself.

When you perform and wear the dog costume, is that sort of a statement about how you feel closer to animals?

When I’m wearing the dog costume, it’s the dog singing. I feel awkward being a human, so I decided to be a dog instead. It feels more natural to be something else.

Is it something that gives you more confidence?

When I first started performing, I was afraid of getting up in front of people. I also didn’t like how I looked, so wearing a costume made it easier.

I’m curious about your choice of instrument. You play pump organ and harmonium, and they’re very noisy. You can hear them creaking and flexing as you play. Is that something you like about them?

I have a lot of pump organs. Each one makes a different sound when I pump on the pedals and it’s important that I’m able to capture the unique qualities they have when I play them.

How did you get so many?

Pump organs aren’t produced in Japan anymore. I own five of them and I found them all at antique shops.

How do you decide when one is worth adding to the collection? What qualities do you check for?

Oftentimes, old pump organs are broken. First, I have to check if it actually works. I shop for them on internet auctions too, and I always ask for a sample recording so I can hear that it’s working and what it sounds like. If it’s different from one that I already have, then I want it.

Are they hard to take care of? Do you know how to repair them?

Pump organs are pretty simple on the inside, kind of like a harmonica. There’s not much maintenance involved, but sometimes I need to change the cloth inside that pumps up the air—like an accordion. Once the cloth gets old, it needs to be replaced. That can sometimes get expensive.

What’s your favorite thing about performing live?

Um. (long pause) I like the vibration between myself and the instruments. And even though I don’t like people much, I like when I’m feeling the music along with an audience.

Music becomes a way to connect with people a little easier, then?

When I was young, I didn’t like playing with other children, but I would find common ground with them through music and movies. In a way, it feels like I’m giving back to the music because it helped me navigate so many social situations growing up.

Do you feel like music is still helping you?

Yes, absolutely.

You do a lot of things besides playing music, like tarot readings. What else do you do?

Are you asking about work or hobbies?

I’d like to hear about either!

For work, I do tarot readings. That’s how I make money besides playing music. As far as hobbies, ever since my cat passed away I’ve been traveling a lot.

Why does tarot reading appeal to you?

I find it interesting that I’m receiving a message from somewhere I don’t know. It’s a very mysterious experience. I’m basically an interpreter between the client and the messages that I’m receiving.

Could you do a tarot reading for me?

(laughter) Sure. Just one second. (pause)

I pulled two cards for today. One says you’ll get to do a lot of fun things and you’ll be bestowed with a variety of new information. It’s going to be a fun day!

The advice card says that you should spend some time for yourself. Instead of waiting on another person’s opinion, follow your own intuition!

Thank you! I’ll take that to heart today. So, I have one more question. What’s one thing you like about yourself?

(laughter) I’ve never thought about that!

Is there anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to mention?

Ah! I forgot to mention that now when I play with Hiko-san, I actually play an electric organ instead of a pump organ so that it can be loud enough. I haven’t released anything since about 2004, but I’m looking forward to putting out something new soon!

Well, I’m excited to hear it!

Thank you, I’m excited too.

So you’re still performing with Hiko-san pretty often?

I played with Hiko-san three times last year. [“Last year,” at the time of speaking, was 2023. -Ed.] We haven’t played at all this year, but I’d love to.

I think that’s just about everything I wanted to ask! Thank you so much for giving me your time.

I appreciate that you already had so much knowledge about me! That makes me happy. Thank you! ✿

Thanks for reading this twelfth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Sorry I sat on this interview for so long. I did this over a year ago, and it was actually supposed to be for Tone Glow. I took so long to transcribe this that TG kind of unofficially went defunct, and I got the okay to self-publish it instead. Better late than never, I suppose, especially considering this is the only interview with Uehara-san you can read in English. She’s one of my all-time favorite musicians and it was a real dream to speak with her, so I hope I did her justice.

As ever: if you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. I’ve got quite the backlog of things I have not published because I’ve been buried under the weight of the world. If you still like me and wanna read my stuff, let me know. My bruised ego needs a little kiss.

Take care, okay? See you next time. 💜

Donate via Ko-fi

Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today on the anniversary of my birth, and as you can probably see, things have not quite gone according to plan. The newsletter has gone pretty quiet, with only one post separating this year’s buddy list from the previous one. I thought about calling it off this time, but ultimately decided I’d be disappointed in myself if I did that. Above all else, this thing is for me. I love my friends and want to hear more about them, and this is my selfish window into their lives. If you happen to enjoy reading it too, that’s a lovely bonus. I’m sure you will.

To get any newcomers up to speed: this is my annual tradition in which I invite friends to reflect on their most recent trip around the sun and share the things they spent their time on. You’ll see that not all of them felt up to getting personal, and that’s fair; it hasn’t been the best year in recent memory, has it? Despite that, they all made the time to give a bit of themselves. Our free moments are precious currency, and it fills my heart that they were willing to spend some of them for me. I’m grateful.

As usual, there are some familiar names if you’ve read the previous installments and some you won’t recognize. This little yearly shindig is both a way to strengthen bonds with close friends, and to build bridges to people I want to get to know better. If you’ve contributed to this list, last year’s, the year before, or one yet to come: thank you. I love you.

(As ever: I didn’t tell any of them to mention me. Please stop. 😭)

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Kei

Looking back at my 2024 conjures to mind the eighth episode of 1959 science fiction horror anthology television series The Twilight Zone, in which a man simply wants more time to read books.

In 2024, after far too many years of making it a habit, I began to pull away from spending time on social media, and it still felt like there was a constant pressure to take all the time I could get whenever I could get it. Much like the aforementioned story, where the bookworm dodges the effects of a nuclear war going on outside by circumstance, I may have dodged worst of it by logging off, but it wasn’t all fun and games after that.

This pressure I put on myself wasn't without benefits though. In January, I installed Ableton Live and began learning about music production. I had entered my anime music obsession just over 10 years ago and it wasn’t long after that I discovered the anime remix community active on sites like SoundCloud and Twitter. I felt inspired by breakthroughs I’d had with understanding song structure and production through DJing to pursue making my own remixes in similar styles to what I’ve listened to for years. Which basically came down to learning music production period.

In pursuing different musical references, I found that working on music is actually an extremely peaceful place for me to retreat to, and it provides an incredibly interesting challenge every time I approach it. Even if I were never to put a single thing out into the public, I would still be happy to pursue it in private, as that’s how much I get out of it on a personal level. It does make me happy even just seeing small numbers on the few things I did put up online though, I admit. The only unfortunate part is how much that time comes at a premium.

Anyway, between practicing DJing on my own, seeking out new music to discuss with friends, and learning to make it, music was an even larger part of my year than it has been before. My list has 10 songs that meant more to me this year than most everything else.

• DiverDiva - “Fashionista (Galbae Cider New Jack Swing Remix)”, which is just one of Galbae Cider's remixes that inspired me to learn how to make music like it. Very directly responsible for me learning what the Korg M1 was. Turns out New Jack Swing has been having a revival in South Korea, but honestly, Galbae Cider was way ahead of that.

• “Glorious Moment！ (Matitann HC Bootleg)”, for m4titann's incredible Note post series which helped me grasp how to structure a remix better than any tutorial I have found yet. Such a key part of me getting fundamentals down, I cannot state my thanks enough.

• “Ready!! Steady!! Derby!!” from Uma Musume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era , which I got to hear live at Uma Musume 5th Tour Event New Gate Day 2 as a member of the crowd for its debut performance. Those horses blew the roof off of that place. Likely the only time I’ll ever hear calls so loud that were made up on the spot.

• “Heart Beats” by emon(Tes.) featuring Himawari, which I found searching for virtual singer/vocaloid dance videos to work out with. I subsequently became obsessed to the point that I threw together my own remix of it just weeks before the Goblin Bunker Public Access 4 event that I definitely needed to already have been assembling music and video for. No worries though, it made the cut.

• “Empty Box (VOID)” by Diamond Dust, covered by Iseri Nina, for introducing me to Iseri Nina. It stands for everything I love about Girls Band Cry, a perfect show for me.

• “Shini Yuku Kisetsu no Kimi e” (To You, In Your Dying Season) by Yanagi Nagi and Jun Maeda, for being the centerpiece of the best sequence I experienced in a video game this year. Every comment on this song from players reads something like “this part of the game made me think ‘I’m happy I’m alive’” and that says it all to me, really.

• “Hino Sasu Mukoue” (Beyond the Sunshine) by She is Legend, for allowing Tomori Kusonoki to directly express how I feel playing Heaven Burns Red for several years now.

• “回層浮” (Kaisou/Reminiscence) by MyGO!!!!!, for allowing me to hear Youmiya Hina scream in real life.

• “Medicine” by Haraguchi Sasuke. Seeing him perform this for YouTube Music Weekend 8.0 as my formal introduction to his music was truly like witnessing lightning in a bottle. This tune did not leave my head for weeks and became my gateway drug to Kasane Teto.

• “Otsukimi Recital” by Jin, for being a hopeful song that gave me something to latch onto when going through rough times this year. I got back into virtual singers in a big way thanks to artists like Haraguchi Sasuke, but for me it all started way back when with KagePro. If virtual singers believe in us, we have to keep believing in them too.

ivy

What an insane one, this year was. Essentially, I went through three interlocking character arcs spanning several months each and now stand before you today, after all of it, feeling… uh, relatively normal, I guess. Outside of all of that noise, I personally accomplished a lot of things I have been trying to accomplish for the last decade, namely releasing an album and playing a live show of all original songs. Yay! I couldn’t have done any of it without my friends convincing me that I can and should, so thank you to all of you! :,)

But enough about all that friendship, let’s fweaking talk shop. In general I find this kind of year-end reflection really tough to do, not so much in an emotional sense, moreso in a… physiological? Sense? I don’t know how else to describe it, but I so rarely take stock of my year that I’m entirely out of practice on it. Attempting to dig back through the memory banks with nothing to prompt them out of their elusive little hovels takes about 200% of the brainpower I have. That all being said, I’m gonna try my best to bring up some things I saw or experienced or viewed or heard or even that I played in the last 12 months that have stuck with me, but I will PROBABLY forget something. Maybe. We’ll see. Transgender WatchMojo vocal fry voice:

Top 4 Things I Watched/Read/Played in 2024 that Someone Specifically Recommended to Me

• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash (1992) (rec’d by Lucie, and just about everyone else ever) — Starting my lists off with the most basic shit possible so when I mention Buffalo ‘66 later, you’re caught completely off guard. Anyways, if Billy G’s Neuromancer is computer anxiety by someone who knows nothing about them, Stevey’s Snow Crash is computer anxiety by someone who knows way too much about them. In a lot of ways, this thing reeeeally is a product of its time, but it is actually insane reading this book and having it evoke extremely specific emotions and scenarios that I’ve experienced while playing VRChat.

• Baby Assassins (dir. Yugo Sakamoto, 2021) (rec’d by golok about 50000 times) — Saori Izawa in the Weezer shirt.

• Suckdog: Drugs Are Nice - A Suckumentary 1988-2005 (2005) (rec’d by Lynn Minmei) — Using this as a general spot to talk about and mention Suckdog since who tf else is gonna?! Suckdog!! I was recommended this after bringing up sinkdog unprompted for the 100th time, and I’m glad I was. Suckdog.

• Lil Hyvää - 応​用​夏​学 (rec’d by shy! (hey girlie!)) — I’ve listened to this more times than betrayed by my last.fm profile. Seriously one of the most gorgeous collections of music I’ve had the privilege of hearing in a while.

Top 4 Things I Watched/Read/Played in 2024 that I Ignored All Attempted Warning Signs Steering Me Away From It

• Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday: Down the Rabbit Hole) — This thing has a Reputation, and for myriad good reasons, but oh my god. If I had to give just one thing the “Favorite Media” crown for this year, it would easily be Wonderful Everyday. So utterly mind melting in every conceivable way, and so singularly committed to every piece of work that inspired its writer.

• Coquette Dragoon — It feels almost unfair to put this on a 2024 list given its status as a Work In Progress, so I’ll compensate by not going into too much detail about it. I love it!

• Kingdom Hearts I.5 & II.5 Final Mix: HD — It’s probably well known amongst my friends that I absolutely adore these games, but to everyone else who didn’t already know that, yeah I’m a fangirl. I replayed these games for the first time since Kingdom Hearts III released back in 2019. Yeah. 2019. Jesus. And so I was really worried that I would butt up against something on this playthrough that would make me realize that these games suck. AND THE RESULT? Look what list this is on and figure it out for yourself!! ;P

• Buffalo ’66 (dir. Vincent Gallo, 1998) — See? Anyways, by all counts this thing should suck, and it does, but it completely accidentally captures something that really stuck with me, and that I refuse to go into any detail about. Maybe don’t watch it! (Reverse psychology) (Double reverse psychology)

Jinhyung Kim

You can read my reflection for Tone Glow here if you're interested in how things went for me in 2024. For the buddy list, I wrote about seven albums/mixes not from 2024 that I had on repeat this year and kept me company through it all.

• ARIE GOGON - DJ AKU TERTIPU KEDIAMANMU X PAMBASILET X SAKITNYA TUTUTU VIRAL TIKTOK JEDAG JEDUG FULL BASS.mp3 (self-released, 2023) — Thanks to my friend from Tone Glow billdifferen, I got super into Jungle Dutch. To quote him:

  [It's] called either Breakbeat or Jungle Dutch[—]it's a offshoot of Funkot music that's more EDM-focused. [It] got popular off of TikTok due to these Jedag Jedug edit videos in Indonesia…

  Mixes are often tagged with "Bass Boosted," "Jedag Jedug," or "Terbaru"/"Terlalu" (the latter of which means "active" in Indonesian). There are enough mixes of this stuff on SoundCloud to sate any living soul for a thousand lifetimes. I typically just follow the algorithm, chipping off bits of the tip of the iceberg. The first mix I found that I really loved got taken off the platform, so I've learned to rip and save the ones I dig. Some of this year's best mixes came from bennni10—a prolific account that uploads 2-hour-plus Vinahouse, Breakbeat, Jungle Dutch, and Manyao mixes almost every other goddamn day; I like to imagine that it really is just one dude. I love how Jungle Dutch is indissociable from the ABG thirst pics that permeate the genre’s social media presence; you'll see this for yourself if you choose to fall down the SoundCloud rabbit hole. It’s self-consciously memetic stuff in both musically and in iconography, and in due course, you’ll hear a bunch of pop songs you know (and some you don’t) churned through the 10,000-volt electric transmogrifier that is this genre’s sound. The mix I chose for this list is pretty short and sweet: just over 20 minutes of pure adrenaline via one rush of tonal whiplash after another. Imagine a world where EDM festivals make top 40 way cooler, instead of even lamer…

• Jun-Y Ciao - Learning from Insects 师虫 (whereisthezeitgeist?editing office, 2019) — There’s a long and storied history of music that lies at the intersection of electronics and nature sounds; their timbral adjacency is something people picked up on almost as soon as electronic music became a thing. The same is true for brass instruments, in a different way; while pitched brass was one of the last parts of the traditional orchestral palette to be effectively imitated by synthesis, free jazz players were quick to realize how noises they could make at the limits of their instruments’ capacities inhabited a continguous realm of waveform fuckery. Learning from Insects completes the triangle by exploring resonances between Ciao's saxophone playing and samples of various insect sounds. While the sense of a direct mimetic relation between, say, a soprano sax and a cricket is perhaps less immediate than the one either might possess with respect to a high-pitched oscillator, the affinities emerge in a sense of rhythm: the little variations of pulse in a cricket’s chirp invite a similar mode of listening as the cracked squeals, vacillating flutter tones, and slide effects that Ciao coaxes in periodic repetition from his instrument. Conversely, hearing the saxophone affects how we hear the insects: as with any reed or brass instrument, one can hear the breath that undergirds the sound, even when the performer is “silent”; Learning from Insects encourages the listener to hear insect noises in the manner of respiratory cycles. No other album I heard this year provided a more open space for meditative attention than this one.

• DJ Screw - Chapter 74: Mash for My Dream (Screwed Up Tapes & Records, 2004) — My current favorite “Diary of the Originator” mix. I played this while cruising around town in a car for a few weeks in July—something I normally don’t get to do; I was housesitting for a friend, so I was driving theirs. I live in Houston, which is 95% sprawl and linked together by a web of cracked pavement resting atop fickle swampland. Hearing this through overblown car speakers while lolling around the vast suburban expanses was deeply fulfilling in a way I probably don't need to explain; the dank, warm breath of the Houston summer night heat whipped through the windows as I let the warping and lurching of the road and the beat both stretch my sense of time. Could not recommend a better way to feel at one with this city.

• Luciano Maggiore - 18 Rhythmic Studies for a Pen, a Cassette Case and a Korean Cassette Deck (Hideous Replica, 2016) — The stutter is a unit just below the threshold of legibility; almost semantic, straining toward it, but not quite. I reread Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee this year and was captivated yet again by its stutter, its constantly getting caught in its throat. The inability to communicate, or the refusal to, or somewhere in between—all this can say so much. The ambivalence is key; the stutter of Dictee often gets read as abjection, or its protest. That's definitely a part of it, but there’s more: there’s also a ritual satisfaction in taking words as forms, sounds, or elements for perpetual recombination. One can play with the building blocks of language in a condition of prelapsarian, pre-egoic joy; even the encounter of a stoppage throws one into the mesmeric state of negative space. To my ears, 18 Rhythmic Studies sonifies this joy of the stutter, the stopping of the throat, and the compelling silence that honors it and suggests the unspoken depths it points toward.

• Organ Tapes - Hunger in Me Living (Tobago Tracks, 2019) — I didn’t really hear anything special in Hunger in Me Living when it came out; the music and Tim Zha’s vocals felt uniformly understated. I didn't bother revisiting Organ Tapes until this year; I’m not exactly sure why, but I hear so much more soul in this album this time around. It might be that my appreciation for music with an ostensibly flat affect has grown considerably since 2019; maybe I have a distance from singer-songwriter music now that allows me to listen to the album as something different; hell, it could just be that I found out Organ Tapes is Asian, and for some reason, I just get where he’s coming from. Whatever it is, I found Hunger in Me Living to be chock-full of tiny yet animate flourishes that had slipped my ears the first time, floating past like little buoys amidst its gentle melancholic ebb and flow; the thick AutoTune that had previously masked emotional specificity now exhibited a willful anonymity, like layers of a veil fluttering gracefully in the persistent breeze. It’s perfect winter music: a bit cold to the touch, but deeply warm and intimate nonetheless.

• Torture - 4 - “Enduring Freedom” (self-released, 2023) — 4 - “Enduring Freedom” confirms that zoomers have grown into and codified their own brand of patriotism: a condemnatory consensus on American empire. It’s odd how this record feels as if it’s straddling two eras—Bush-era protest against the Iraq war on the one hand, but also a broader understanding of American global and domestic hegemony impressed upon young folk today on the other. It’s not as if the geopolitics have changed fundamentally over the last twenty years, but in the media consciousness, military might and the diplomatic theater of foreign policy are now just the tip of the iceberg. People on social media saw videos and got live feed updates from Ferguson to Gaza—all the anger and suffering of the thousands and millions actually on the ground, bearing so much direct violence with their bodies, eyes, and voices; there’s innumerable threads detailing all the industries and channels of capital that fuel that violence. Given the frequency of state brutality and the exponential multiplication of the witnesses to its production and use, it’s become harder for anyone who claims to be against it to not connect all the dots.

  Of course, there are plenty who refuse. But among people who are online, the centrist middle has been steadily destabilizing over the past several years; to comment any further on this (especially the “online” part) would take this blurb way too far afield. Suffice it to say that 4 - “Enduring Freedom” taps into a political mood that feels very much in line with the 2020s, despite the iconography of its cover. The covers for the three Torture albums that preceded it are gruesome images of American cruelties of the Iraq War, which really ought not to have been embedded as the main album image on Bandcamp; some sort of content warning would have been advisable. But their use follows the ethos of zoomer anti-imperialism: you cannot deny what is put before your very eyes. The music on 4 - “Enduring Freedom” is blunt, but not in a mode of direct address, a la the ’90s to ’00s tradition of heavy music in protest. It’s slow and thick, all sputtery low end; it’s viscous and errant in its rhythms, with a vocal delivery that rarely departs from a steady, menacing bullfrog croak. The album’s sound is of a piece with its politics—maybe protest shouldn’t be catchy or anthemic; maybe it should be as fucking nasty as the thing we’re protesting. That doesn’t stop it from being really good music, though.

• Trang Hạ - Đừng Nhớ Người Xa (Giọng Ca Để Đời, 2021) — I first got into Vietnamese bolero a few years ago when I was introduced to Hà Vân's Tiếng Hát Hà Vân. A lot of records in the genre, even some of the classics, can be a little heavyhanded with their production, but the good stuff conjures a subtle and soulful yearning of an ilk that’s hard to come by. Đừng Nhớ Người Xa is my favorite Viet bolero album that I found this year—the Spotify algorithm threw “Người Đã Nói” my way one day, and it blew me out of the water with its delightful staccato guitar hook, which lands with a forceful duh-duhn from the piano on the downbeat and sharp, synthetic string trills on the upbeat; each element, in its restraint, makes the breadth of the mix pop. “Lửa Mùa Hạ” opens with an overdriven guitar lead that sears atop a crashing cascade of drums, punctuated every so often by what sounds like a triangle player tinkling their instrument as if it were a school alarm bell. But this is all far from overwhelming—the distinction between lyric and ornament persists, creating a throughline between the more raucous instrumental sections and the more discreet accompaniment during verses, which play off of each other well. What impresses me overall about the album is how it integrates a large variety of synthetic sounds and novelties into its palette while still evoking the magic and warmth of a small ensemble. For a genre whose forms and tradition stretch back nearly a century, these soft modernizations push the envelope with great ingenuity.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

For the last two buddy lists I wrote down goals that I had for myself as I was heading into the new year. I appreciate how much the goals don’t actually matter beyond being a form of record keeping; they’re a way to reflect on what matters to me now, and seeing how much that changes over the course of 12 months. Seeing that evolution is crucial. My goals for the year are pretty simple this time around: keep Tone Glow afloat, organize more stuff IRL with people in Chicago, read more, write more, and eat more good food.

Favorite Concerts of 2024

1. Toiret Status, Koeosaeme, CVN, Tentacle 229, and Dawn Division at DADS in Chicago, 10/11

2. Still House Plants at Co-Prosperity in Chicago, 9/25

3. Roméo Poirier at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, 11/6

4. Charli XCX at Radius in Chicago, 6/12

5. Model/Actriz at Pitchfork Musical Festival in Chicago, 7/21

6. Tinashe at Radius in Chicago, 2/15

7. Foodman, Jana Rush, EQ Why, DJ Hanks, Toxic Yuri Love Triangle, and Mukqs at Archer Ballroom in Chicago, 12/14

8. Chuquimamani-Condori at Prosper Skate Shop in Chicago, 2/23

9. Tyla at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 7/31

10. Rafael Toral, Daniel Wyche at Elastic Arts in Chicago, 10/22

11. The Softies at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia, 10/3

12. Astrid Sonne at Co-Prosperity in Chicago, 9/26

13. Kim Gordon, Irreversible Entanglements, and Drew McDowall at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, 6/8

14. MJ Lenderman at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 10/16

15. Eiko Ishibashi at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago, 5/11

16. ML Buch at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 12/11

17. Wendy Eisenberg, Big Bend at Constellation in Chicago, 11/15

18. Ice Spice, Cash Cobain at The Met in Philadelphia, 8/2

19. Jessica Pratt at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, 9/13

20. Laurel Halo with Leila Bordreuil at the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago, 11/8

21. Amina Claudine Myers at the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, 8/29

22. Sour Spirit at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, 8/4

23. Nilüfer Yanya at the Metro in Chicago, 10/7

24. Agriculture, Porcelain at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 11/5

25. Jan Jelinek at Constellation in Chicago, 11/13

26. Kevin Drumm at Constellation in Chicago, 2/8

27. Asa-Chang & Junray at the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, 10/26

28. American Football at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 9/27

29. Sachiko Kanenobu at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, 10/5

30. SahBabii at Avondale Music Hall in Chicago, 12/22

maría ilmutus

DEAD BUT DREAMING.

i love this phrase. i like to put it under everything i make. but what does it actually mean? while i’d love to act mysterious and hint at some deeper significance, the truth is that it means nothing. i just like the words. in reality, i’ve never had a guiding philosophy behind my art—i just create for creation’s sake. i love ideas and i dream a lot: big dreams, little dreams, sweet dreams, dark dreams. in them, i sense my calling... to explore unmapped emotions. deep down though, i’m still searching for meaning.

unfortunately, it’s gotten harder and harder to hit my personal milestones due to some really brutal circumstances. the last few years have taken, what feels like, everything from me. i’m only 24, so i know how silly that sounds—this is all just part of adulthood—but it can be so devastating to lose basic resources, your financial stability, your family, your pets... when you never had any structure to begin with. really, i’ve been improvising ever since i dropped out of high school! i guess that’s why i keep making things. because it’s the only thing i can do. i’m just learning new tricks in hopes of finding some solace... and some money.

having said that, i think my art hands were pretty idle in 2024. i overworked myself last year and really needed a breather so i spent more time admiring craft than honing it. i watched like a hundred movies/anime, read dozens of manga and listened to a bunch of albums. i realized some years ago that i had become quite passive about my media engagement so i tried to seek out new experiences. i’m tempted to say this was inspired by the youtube channel i started, but i’d much rather thank my friends. the kind people i befriended this year really opened my eyes. not naming any names, as to not embarrass anyone, but you know who you are!

despite the money troubles, the grueling winter cold and being stuck in this shitty haunted town... i’m still here! i made some goofy-ass videos, wrote some bad poems, laughed with my friends, met some amazing people (who are all way cooler than me) and finally let myself be. but as the year comes to a close i realize just how much i’ve yet to learn. i need to piece my life back together, for one. but i also need to pursue music seriously again! it was such a huge passion yet i stagnated so hard. i’m gonna start analyzing songs critically again, and speaking with other musicians (locally & online). on top of all that, i need to keep searching for the "maría" in my heart. funny as it may sound, i know there's a very strong person inside of me—a beautiful person—and i will find her. her shape and intensity keep changing, like a flame in the wind. but i can change too. i’ve done it before and i’ll do it again.

realistically, i can’t guarantee that i’ll survive whatever B.S. life decides to throw at me next year… but i’ll try!... promise. ♥

some manga

• sing “yesterday” for me by kei toume — i finally finished it. the manga that got me back into comics, slowly and over the course of several years. i’m thankful to have shared it with one of my best friends, who showed it to me and said “hey, seems like your kinda thing.” she was right!

• river’s edge by kyoko okazaki — this one’s very visceral for me. i tend to feel strongly about things which remind me, distinctly, of high school.

• yokohama kaidashi kikou by hitoshi ashinano — the whole thing. lovely, terrifying, essential.

• the caterpillar by suehiro maruo — it do be like that sometimes!!!

• reading about gekiga (activity) — a rabbit hole i wasn’t expecting to fall down. shoutouts to ryan holmberg and thecomicsjournal!

• drawing manga studies (activity) — yep, with screen tones and everything. i got some cool digital illustrations out of this!

meaningful things that were enabled by having internet access:

• sharing WIP music files with certain musicians i met online this year.

• streaming weird anime and movies to my old friends on discord — i’m glad i upgraded my internet, i’ve been able to show them so many questionable things!

• sharing/encoding/downloading/subtitling video files.

• joining the “goblin bunker public access” stream.

• being invited to write for this list — i really don't think i belong here but if shy says it’s okay, then i guess it is! thank you dear :-)

• listening to the “human insects” podcast — i put it off for years but i finally listened to all of it. very fun. great music discussions!

  ---

Rist

Before this year, I had never really had a stable sense of community. I think there’s an insecurity at the heart of why that is, something to do with me feeling too inadequate or too afraid to ask people to pay attention to me long enough to maybe like me. It’s still something I struggle with, but finding online groups and meeting people like Shy has been the best thing in my life so far for getting over that.

I’m constantly reflecting on just how vast the difference is between where I am now and where I was before. 2023 feels like a lifetime ago, and in a lot of ways it is. I’m having new experiences with art at about ten times the rate I used to. I’ve met people who have seen all the shit I thought were deep cuts and who’ll recommend stuff I never would have found without their help. I’m finding that I can just make stuff whenever I want and I have others that I can show it to. I never realized how much I could care because I never had the right environment for that enthusiasm to reflect back onto me. Spending time with everyone I’ve met this year has made me want to try harder and harder to be someone I’m proud of. I can truly say that I’ve met my people.

There’s a lot of ways that I’m trying to make 2025 even better, but this is the first time in my life that I have a strong sense of who I am and who I want to be, and I owe it all to the people who have made me feel welcome in their home.

Top Ten Best Things I Got To Do in 2024

1. Fujo out over Bang Bravern, Like a Dragon, and Kamen Rider Kuuga

2. Join a zine group where I can write about my love for Sonic the Hedgehog

3. Get bullied repeatedly into having transcendental experiences with art

4. Start a game club as an excuse to talk about why cute anime girls are the best

5. Share a secret about myself in the chatroom of a virtual DJ set

6. Stream increasingly shitty movies to people I care about

7. Fall in love with the sport of sumo

8. Find out that I actually do enjoy roguelikes, I just had never played one before

9. Realize that Boredoms contains the best collective of musicians to ever exist

10. Make a bunch of new friends

dicegame uchiha

My 2024 began with me staring down the barrel. I lost my job in early 2023 and took the opportunity to coast on unemployment and go “All In” on a video game I prototyped in 2020. By the end of the year, my savings were packed into shotgun casings and aimed at the rental agency. The video game could probably never be published—unless there was a publisher who suddenly became Really Fucking Cool. So the beginning of 2024 started Serious. Near the end of February, after about 4 months of searching, I secured a job and retreated to a life of eating, sleeping, and working.

Throughout this lull period something interesting happened. Without the pressure of an all-encompassing long term project (The Video Game), I fell back in love with making music—something I’ve been doing far longer than making video games. Enter: my roommate and new friends. It’s understated how ephemeral making music with other people is. I’m not the type to actively advertise or publicly seek people to play with. I prefer to let it happen naturally between friends; thanks to some cosmic luck, that happened this year. We Learned To Rock Again. And We Did Rock. This changed my listening greatly. I settled back into the “Old Me,” raising my love for rock music back from the dead. I present below my own “Buddy List” encompassing the attitude of our basement studio and the friends who have come by to play.

• Camberwell Now - “Working Nights” — The Band After This Heat. Another avant-prog / post-punk epic. We’re trying to actively rip this one off.

• Massacre - “Killing Time” — I saw this record in one of Portland’s strangest independent bookstores recently and have been kicking myself for not picking it up. Bill Laswell · Fred Frith · Fred Maher. Y’all know about that “egg-punk” shit every smelly guy with a mustache, carabiner, and beanie seems to like? Try this one out and then we can talk.

• Free Kitten - “Harvest Spoon” — What can I say, this song is effortless. 2 chords.

• Saboten - サボテン — 80s post punk oddity. This has been a comfort-food listen for me. Something about the vibe always breaks me out of the post-work malaise. This and a CBD soda.

• Throbbing Gristle - “Hit by a Rock” (At The Highbury Roundhouse, London) — This is what the basement sounds like after we’ve all had a rough ass day.

• Scientists - “Human Jukebox” — The dynamic range on this recording is inspired. You really gotta turn it up and let those blown out vocals grow, some hair on your shoulder. Hair of the Dog.

• Pengo - A Nervous Splendor — Blind bought this at a record store because of the rip-off “Actuel” design. Went down a rabbit hole on the military bands under Ugandan president Idi Amin Dada Oumee. Experienced raw ego death.

• Dead Moon - “Spectacle” (Eindhoven, Netherlands 1992) — Another 2-chord scorcher. You can see god to this one.

• The The - “Flesh and Bones” — This one is for my roommate Jack <3

• Lez Rallizes Denudes - “俺は暗黒 / I'm the Darkness” — This CD has been in my car for months and I don’t see it leaving anytime soon. Nothing like driving home late to this song.

Ryan Waller

At the school where I teach, my students became obsessed with a meme last month where a guy attempting to shoot a basketball into a hoop covered in spikes misses his shot, then says “I understand it now!” and immediately sinks the next one. I can’t think of many videos I relate to more these days. Despite the hardships I’ve faced this year, life has finally started to feel like it’s making sense.

I have accomplished about 25% of what I wanted to accomplish this year. This is natural and not surprising. I think everyone falls short of what they intend to do every year, but one thing I was able to accomplish was deepening my understanding of my creative process. Through the art I consumed, the conversations I held, and the choices I made, I truly feel like I’ve grown immensely as a person. Of course, I couldn’t do that without the patient people who keep caring for me and making space for me in their lives. Shy, thank you so much for letting me be your friend. You have taught me so much about being curious, being open-minded, being honest, and being emotionally vulnerable. I only hope I can offer you even half of the kindness you show me.

Below are some albums I really really love from this year. I hope you find something worth listening to.

• Able Noise - High Tide — The moment the first DJ Screw-esque reload launches seconds into this hypnotic record on my first listen, my brain literally drooled out of my ears. Rock music free of dogma.

• E L U C I D - Revelator — BREAKING NEWS: Greatest rapper alive makes another perfect record: millions are shocked the world over.

• Paco Panama - Southside Sopranos — The benchmark for good rap music. Gorgeous, rich beats and solid bars filled with a cool, easy humor.

• HavinMotion - MOTION — The other end of the DMV rap renaissance. Cloudy yet melodically active crank beats with a rapper who, despite all of his claims to the contrary, seems to enjoy getting his silly and funny bars off.

• Chuckyy - Tweak Till the End — A new frontier for the depths of contemporary gangsta rap. Chicago drill reinterpreted via Philly and the UK, a leap forward for horrorcore. Beats reimagined as massive yawning caverns of echoing pianos and animal sound effects, with the slipperiest, most abstract quantum triplet flowers you’ve ever heard weaving in and out like hyenas devouring a dying antelope.

• Nídia & Valentina Magaletti - Estradas — Two of the most brilliant sound workers in the world going rhythm for rhythm and producing a magnificent canvas of sound in the process.

• Richie Culver - Hostile Environments — Like a Subtext artist doing dub poetry. Crushing, lonely and massive, just like 2024.

• Red Hot Organization - TRA​И​Ƨ​A — This has been an amazing year for compilations, anthologies, and charity records. TRA​И​Ƨ​A is one of the best, and most important. It’s amazing to get a new Sade song, and such a beautiful one at that, but there are amazing collaborations all over this. Lucy Liu and Grouper? Moses Sumney and ANOHNI? Niecy Blues and Joy Guidry?! Rachika Nayar and Julianna Barwick?! Kelela and Nsámbu Za Suékama?! SEVERAL BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND APPEARANCES?!? This album is important for a thousand reasons, but it’s also a genuine joy to listen to. Considering how many cooks were in the kitchen, that’s amazing to me.

• RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY — An equally crucial and amazing compilation by one of the greatest labels around, PTP. Everything and everyone here is incredibly important if you care about art PERIOD. Peace to Griff Spex, Malik Abdul-Rahmaan, YATTA, and everyone on here.

• Outer Spaceways Incorporated : Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra — Another Red Hot masterpiece. Kronos Quartet teaming up with pretty much almost all of my heroes to take Sun Ra even further into space.

• Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) — Jazz as it should be. A raw black scream of power, vulnerability, and love. Along with the أحمد [Ahmed], Space and Sly & the Family Drone albums, this is the best jazz is gonna get all year.

• Ghostmass - Improvisation for Dusty Ballz & Ghost Meditation — Two of the pinnacles of music for me this year. Chinese noise metal mastered by the god Lasse Marhaug? Engineered for me at this point. Shouts out to Yan Jun.

• Klein - Marked — Klein has been the best musician in the world for like seven years now and she clearly is not interested in taking her foot off our necks yet. I’m happy to stay where I am, personally.

• Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Estrella Por Estrella — If you make music with guitars, you have a moral obligation to study the shit JCC is doing on this record. There is guitar music before and after this record, in my opinion. Get on the right side of history if you ain’t already.

• Endon - Fall of Spring — The best currently active Japanese band is finally back, and they have unleashed an incredible elegiac current of pure noise hell. Incredibly cathartic. RIP Etsuo Nagura.

• more eaze and Kaho Matsui - computer and recording works for girls — If you listen to any ambient music this year, make it this. Absolutely essential record. Calling it ambient is a disservice honestly. Just listen!

Patrick Lynn Wilson

2024, much like the years immediately preceding it, was a bit rough.

But let’s not dwell upon that. Rather, we’ll recall one of the best things to bechance 2024: Shy gifting me Masato Saito’s Fragment of Tomorrow, a collection of 10 cover songs recorded over 10 days during the thick of the Coronavirus lockdown in April 2020, and only released through Japan’s great Galaxy Train label this past February.

Masato is a purveyor of that varietal of Velvets-like strummy, folk rock cross-pollinated with ‘90s twee tape-pop and slowcore dynamics that drive a particular set of music nerd into Devils of Loudun-like convulsions. Masato’s old outfit Pervenche have a brilliant 2001 debut record, Subtle Song, followed up by a second album, quite small happiness, released 20 years later but carrying the exact same torch at the same lumens—some people are truly gifted with the musical goods to really get the heads hopping at the sock hop.

Fragment of Tomorrow is a bonnet deserving of the headiest of heads; a mixtape assortment of ’60s and ’70s cuts covering the suspecting usuals: Eno, Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, Television, Can, and, of course, the Velvets’ “Sunday Morning.” The vibe is appropriately early morning—hazy, reverbed, languid—with each song growing more gorgeous than the last, their subsequent rhythms resembling the comfortable rocking of a rowboat adrift off the breeze. My favorite track is the cover of Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights,” which envisions the German automatons’ metropole fanfare into something more akin to a liturgical hymn sung ‘round a campfire.

I spent so much of 2024 listening to Fragment of Tomorrow, either tucked away in reading or hurtling down the street working, the lightness of the music buoying me and sparking mutual love for this sort of record nerd music—-from Shy, Masato, and myself—as well as for that love located in the friendship between Shy and myself. 2024 will forever be marked as the year that Shy had me listen to Fragment of Tomorrow, and that more than makes up for most misgivings about a bit of bumpiness along the year’s path.

Lynn’s Top 10 Albums of 2024

1. Itasca – Imitation of War

2. Space – Embrace the Space

3. Masato Saito – Fragment of Tomorrow

4. Niboowin – giving in

5. bulletsbetweentongues – The Lights Never Lie

6. ivy synthetic – meaningless off-screen death

7. PAS TASTA – GRAND POP

8. The Fiery Furnaces – Stuck in My Head

9. Cancer House – demos

10. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Estrella Por Estrella

• +1: Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee (Already timeless album, so it needn’t be ranked. Must a lonely astrologer graze a star just to prove they exist?)

Shy Clara Thompson

Something I’ve come to appreciate about writing these yearly reflections is that it will inevitably become a thread that connects me to a future self. I referred to my writing from previous years while trying to figure out what I’d like to say this time, and I’m sometimes struck by my own revelations. In the inaugural issue, I wrote about how honoring my loved ones has become so important to me that I changed my own name a little to remind myself of the mission. The following year, I astutely predicted that it would be premature to declare 2024 to be the start of a comeback. (It absolutely was not.) This year, if there’s any message I would like to impart to an older and wiser version of myself, it’s: I dunno. lmao.

I feel like I know less about myself than last year, and that’s equal parts exciting and terrifying. My social life has shuffled around in small, but significant ways; I’ve gotten extremely close to people I didn’t even know six months ago, and some of my longest-lasting friendships have changed in ways I never thought possible. I’ve lived in the same apartment for the past thirteen years, but I don’t know if I’ll still be here next year. I have fallen into career opportunities that I would have once said were outside my skill set, but I’m gonna see where they take me. I’m more uncertain about how tomorrow will look than ever in my adult life, and I’m not sure if I like it.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m afraid. As I navigate unfamiliar relationships and make myself vulnerable to people whose responses I can’t predict, I cringe. Working with people I have no rapport with, I’m bracing myself for the inevitable disappointment I’m going to saddle them with for placing their trust in me. I like to take things slow. I need time to deliberate my next move. An unfortunate truth I’ve discovered, though, is that with enough time I can craft an airtight argument why I shouldn’t bother doing almost anything. I’m tired of having those arguments with myself, so I’m trying to have less of them. I know I won't always succeed. Fear is a powerful inhibitor, especially when you’re as skittish as I am. But I’m also afraid of accumulating too many scenarios where I’m upset at myself for not giving something a try. I’ve got far too many weighing me down already.

Ten albums I loved that didn’t come out this year

• Dream Dolphin - Visions/Rebirth/Underwater (1997)

• Facundo Cabral - Facundo Cabral (1971)

• Jewel Akens - The Birds and the Bees (1965)

• Hanali - Rock Music (2013)

• Kiyoshi Kobayashi - Pacific Swing (2006)

• Mar-pa - Rimland (1989)

• Meadowdale Middle School 8th Grade Jazz Band - 2005-2006 (2006)

• Satellite Lovers - Sons of 1973 (1996)

• Usushioshisuu - Crazy Salt Rock (2014)

• Yuka Umezawa & Tomoko Tsuyama - Fishes’ Dream (2004)

Top five guys I hugged when I got sad

• #1 🐈

• #2 👻

• #3 🎤

• #4 🐸

• #5 🐹

Thanks for reading this eleventh installment of once bitten, twice shy. This would normally be where I apologize for not posting more and make big promises for the future, but I’ll spare you this time. I would simply like to thank my friends for making life worth living. Below, I have compiled a list of past and present buddy list contributors’ other projects. They all do fascinating stuff, so please have a look.

I’d also like to make a small housekeeping note that I have updated my about page with the most current information, if you’d like to find my socials and such.

If you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. It’s my birthday, so that’s another good reason to toss me some change. Don’t ask me how old I am! I’ve been seventeen for as long as I can remember.

I’ll be seeing you. Happy new year. Give your friends a hug and your sweetheart a kiss.

Donate via Ko-fi

Blogroll

• Nicky Austin is no longer with us, but left behind a wealth of great writing at Letterboxd and Backloggd.

• Baxter runs his own newsletter called Tsundoku Diving, covering all sorts of esoteric Japanese media.

• ivy makes music under the name ivy sinthetic and has a website with some stuff on it over at ivy.dog.

• Jai makes thoughtful video essays about a variety of topics including film, television, and manga over on their YouTube channel.

• Kei makes incredible mixes and remixes of anime and idol songs as dj takamine mion.

• Jinhyung Kim wrote a quarterly column covering sound poetry for Bandcamp, which wrapped up recently.

• Joshua Minsoo Kim does about a million things, but most notably runs the Tone Glow newsletter, which I also contribute to.

• maría ilmutus makes video essays covering a variety of topics like weird anime and video games on her YouTube channel.

• Rist co-writes for Mobius Loop, a digest on all things relating to the Sonic the Hedgehog comics published by Archie.

• Shy Clara Thompson is me, hi. I maintain this newsletter and do culture writing in various places. Most recently, I put together a primer on calypso music.

• dicegame uchiha is hard at work on a game called SYYGYL and also posts badly on X dot com the Everything App.

• Ryan Waller runs the newsletter Vacant World, covering a variety of topics that interest them.

P.S. I passed the time putting this post together listening to Giant Beauty (2024) by أحمد [Ahmed]. It is handily the best album of the year, in my opinion.

Collaboration is usually just an excuse to get things done. When you commit to doing something with one or more people, the benefits are immediate. You’ve got someone to bounce ideas off. Someone’s there to hold you to account if you start slacking. You get to see the amazing things your peers are capable of, giving you motivation to elevate what you bring to the project. I’ve always romanticized the idea of an “art collective” in which I’m locked in a creative contract with like-minded friends, buoying one another and pushing the group to new imaginative heights. In theory, it sounds like a great shortcut; in practice, creative endeavors are still difficult. You still have to give them your all.

Tokyo’s Image Forum, which puts together yearly festivals for experimental art and film, is tough work. Under the guidance of the program’s director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita, a group of intrepid filmmakers is assembled and given a prompt to start with. In 2006, Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces—the first publicly screened animated film—was nearing its hundredth anniversary. The Image Forum, looking to celebrate the occasion, sought out independent animators for that year’s festival. The theme provided was “life in the city of Tokyo”—which is, of course, intentionally vague. It’s simply a germ ideas can begin to multiply from.

Another common thread is that every film features music by Seiichi Yamamoto, a legend of Osaka’s underground scene and the guitarist from the band Boredoms. (Their album Pop Tatari, by the way, is one of the all-time greatest.) Yamamoto composed for the films before even seeing them, using sketches and storyboards as his guide before making minor adjustments for the finished cut. The filmmakers had a chance to respond to Yamamoto’s score, which took inspiration from their unfinished idea. It was a uniquely collaborative process; Yamamoto got to see sixteen different people work in vastly different ways and solve unique problems with each of them.

When I approached several friends to help me cover the Tokyo Loop anthology, I had a similar privilege to see a window into their minds. My instructions were also vague: write about your assigned film however you feel compelled to. Some chose to research the filmmaker; some chose to tell personal anecdotes; some chose to speak in images; some chose to be silly. I’m grateful to all of them for their contributions. Below, you’ll find reviews of each film by me or one of my pals. What we’ve put together is a fascinating survey of Japanese independent animation—but more importantly for me, it was a good reason to do something with people whose thoughts I love to hear.

Tokyo Loop is available in full on Archive. I encourage you to watch every film. They’re all only five minutes at most! —Shy Clara Thompson

Subscribe now

Unbalance (dir. Takashi Ito)

Takashi Ito was disturbed while making Unbalance. In his description for the film, he explains that this work is a reflection of his thoughts on Tokyo, meant to portray “the emotional state of people struggling and suffering in this very superficial world.” This isn't new territory for the avant-garde filmmaker, as his shorts have always been defined by their uneasy atmosphere. His goals, really, have remained consistent: with 1982’s Thunder, he longed to “depict the disgust and beauty of the human body collapsing,” he relayed in a 2009 interview. Such grotesqueries are never presented as mere shock-value; instead, Ito’s films are a result of identifiably patient methodologies, utilizing pixilation and long exposure to capture life as a spectral haze.

Unbalance begins with this same unsettling air: a human face presses through a white sheet, his mouth opening wide as if screaming for help. No diegetic sound appears, leaving our understanding of his pain incomplete. Soon, the image dissipates in flames. Ito soon grounds this abstract imagery in the real world: a cut reveals an unfurling hand and then a man’s face, but even though his body is uncovered this time, his worried demeanor communicates uncertainty. A time-lapse shot of moving clouds is juxtaposed with his wandering eyes, as if he is watching the world move on without him. Soon, his back faces the camera and his head is face down; the tone is ominous, and his haunted presence is like one from a 1990s J-horror. When movement does arrive, it does so with his sudden collapse onto the ground. The remainder of the film largely shows him struggling to stand, wrestling with another body, and his face getting distorted: this isn’t forward momentum, just frustrated spasms.

Ito opts for more jittery motions and edits as Unbalance progresses. With rephotography, he pans the image so that we move outside its frame, and the resulting effect is uncanny: we feel the claustrophobic nature of this man’s situation, as if he is stuck within the confines of this filmic space, but there is also a longing for total release. When we watch him struggling in a hallway, it is akin to voyeuristically watching CCTV footage of someone in a psychiatric hospital. There are cuts to a pitch-black space, too, which bridge the realism back to the metaphorical, symbolizing his mental breakdown. The soundtrack proves caustic, as it is little more than blaring, intermittent noise. The cacophony, provided by Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, doesn’t correspond to any of the edits, and instead provides another point of disjuncture to feel detached. It is an “intense reality” that Ito always longs for viewers to experience. And with Unbalance, he is able to make numbness palpable. —Joshua Minsoo Kim

Fig (dir. Koji Yamamura)

Koji Yamamura’s dreamlike style draws heavily from Soviet cartoonists like Priit Pärn and Yuri Norstein, as well as the pioneer of motion photography Eadweard Muybridge, and the admixture of these potent influences refuses easy interpretation or categorization. Yamamura centers Fig on a man with a block-shaped head, with Tokyo Tower serving as his nose. Our protagonist’s reality-warping melancholy pairs well with Seiichi Yamamoto’s melodramatic jazz soundtrack, but the visceral qualities of Yamamura’s usage of sound shines through the short continually. From the wet slap of the protagonist flicking a clump of his own tears through a powerline, to the sound of a bird’s wings flapping, to the soothing pour of water from the head of the titular fig towards the end, Yamamura uses these evocative sounds to anchor us as we’re set along a flowing river of rhyming images that keep the viewer on their toes.  

At the end of the short we see a breathtaking shot where a lightbulb is shown to shatter, with the shading inside of it falling out to become the fig as it lands on a table below. As the man departs into the sky, and the sun rises over Tokyo, we see the tower now in the distance, a plate of figs on the table in the foreground. Yamamura conjures this quiet, lonely scenario with such a warmth, aided by the soft guitar of Yamamoto’s second track, and I’m brought back to the solitary days I’ve spent during the pandemic, watching the sun rise as I missed the life I had before. Fig’s fable-like story of a depressed man wearing one of Tokyo’s most iconic figures on his face incorporates his myriad influences into a beautifully strange and deeply affecting work that soothed my solitude and made me feel less alone. Though his style changes often, his ability to make one feel understood in their madness makes him a powerful director. —Ryan Waller

Tokyo Trip (dir. Keiichi Tanaami)

Keiichi Tanaami is one of Japan’s first pop artists. Inspired by the multimedia approach of Andy Warhol, he told visual stories of Japanese life in bold color—not only in the visual arts, but through animation and film too. Tanaami’s early forays into filmmaking borrowed heavily from American iconography, rendering images of recognizable faces like John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe alongside realistic cutouts of consumer products and still images from pornography. Over time, Tanaami would move away from American imagery and turn inward, basing more of his artwork on childhood memories and scenes that came to him in dreams. With a shift in subject matter came changes in style; occasionally, the striking blocks of primary colors would be absent, giving way to looser works in pen and pencil that lacked the visual clarity Tanaami became known for.

Tokyo Trip strings together a series of scenes that, superficially, don’t seem related to one another at all. An eyeball perched atop four legs sprints at full speed, then slows to a brisk walk; a train with a goblinesque face speeds along a set of tracks, picking up so much momentum that its ghastly visage is obscured by motion; a gangly hand grasps onto what appears to be a teru teru bōzu while rain pours down in an unending torrent. Each little tableau only lasts a few seconds before moving on to the next, animated only by a handful of oscillating frames. You’re given a scant few clues about what's unfolding in front of you, mostly in the suggestion of directional motion. Tokyo Trip is the most similar film in the collection to Humorous Phases of Funny Faces—the film Tokyo Loop is commemorating—especially in its rudimentary animation techniques. Distorted humanoid forms and exaggerated motion tell a nonlinear tale of, presumably, a version of Tokyo that exists below the surface of Tanaami’s own consciousness. It was as if he’s trying to capture the inscrutable logic of dreams. —Shy Clara Thompson

Public Convenience (dir. Tabaimo)

I hate public restrooms. 

I hate them because when I am in one, I feel like I understand too much. They are containers for the reality of us; try as we might to cover it all up with aerosol and fans and stalls to hide us away, we still run to them to shit and cry and expel our shame. They are places of gossip and crime and heartbreak and sex—our private truths laid bare in a room we all gather together in to convince ourselves we are alone. We do our business while ignoring others and wash our hands and leave and pretend that nothing at all happened.

But something did. Something is always happening. None of us can ever really leave the restroom.

Artist Tabaimo’s short film, Public Convenience, takes place in a public restroom. It’s full of filth. The film operates with a rhythmic repetition, animated characters reenacting the same actions as if on a loop while women’s voices hum and glitch and break down in the background. In one stall, a woman tries again and again to flush a turtle. In another, a newborn baby wrapped up in a plastic bag. Someone walks up to the sink, looks at herself, and breaks the mirror. A bird with camera eyes spies on them all. Watching this animated menagerie is to watch the world become a cartoon, turn unreal.

That’s how it always is in a restroom. And that’s how it always is online.

“There’s an interesting similarity,” Tabaimo says in an interview for Modern Museet about the film, “between public lavatories and the internet… The same anonymity exists.” 

She’s right. The internet is exactly the same. Given any illusion of anonymity, we write on the walls and shit on the floor. We let our insides spill out of every pore of our body, all of the awful things we don’t want the world to see. After all, it is a place for gossip invented and real, a place for desperate blogs and tweets and DMs; a place for image boards that celebrate school shooters and forums dedicated to driving strangers to suicide. 

And like a restroom, the privacy is an illusion, the anonymity a lie. If anyone opens their eyes and looks, they can see you. They can know who you are. And yet, we have been trained to believe we are alone so well that our outsides have begun to fade, our features disappear. We let everything turn into a cartoon, safe and separate from reality. 

Public Convenience ends with a woman looking into the mirrors, then leaving the restroom. The camera does not follow. It sits on those mirrors, one broken, as they reflect back the restroom. They reflect back us. They reflect back nothing. —Baxter

TOKYO (dir. Atsuko Uda)

Atsuko Uda cheekily wraps the title of her contribution to Tokyo Loop in the infamous HTML <blink> tag which, if it were a webpage, would cause the words contained within to flash in and out of existence much like the neon signs that TOKYO uses as muse. <blink> allowed for the breath of life, a kind of crude animation, into the mostly static web pages of the early web. I've always been fascinated by cinema that makes commentary on the nature of the form as a kind of light show, calling attention to the rapid flashing of images that create the sensation of movement.

There is the genre of flicker films, or, for a more gentle example, Nathaniel Dorsky's recent aperture experiments in which he stops his camera down till the image darkens before opening the lens up again, creating the sensation of an eyelid blinking. But this is not just a game for avant-garde cinema, Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind both worships and fears light, a holy fire equally salvific and destructive. In TOKYO, light often takes the form of baubles—glowing, blinking orbs—overlaid on simple shapes to create the illusion of movement, not so much in the usual cinematic form but more like advertising signs that animate their subjects by rapidly switching on and off certain parts of the image to create an illusion of motion. TOKYO's Tokyo is a literal city of lights, the world rewritten in the lexicon of commercial light, those signs which beckon adventures within.

The film imposes a psychedelic overlay over a bus's traversal, which recreates the natural and urban landscapes of Tokyo, distilled to postcard iconicity, by way of gently looping blinks that culminates with the city as simultaneous kaleidoscope. Uda allows the viewer to read the city as a film: a series of flickering lights filtered through the windows of a bus create a hypermodern landscape penned in a neon language. —malaphorically

Black Fish (dir. Nobuhiro Aihara)

Aihara was an experienced and versatile animator whose work graced many commercially renowned and successful anime, from Galaxy Express 999 to Gauche the Cellist, but the bulk of his legacy lays with his trailblazing independent work, of which Black Fish is a strong example. Black Fish revolves around a surging maelstrom of colors that pulse and flow with a musical intensity. The beginning of the film, with its surging heavy color obscured by massive swathes of black, combines with Seiichi Yamamoto’s soothing ambient soundtrack. It’s as if Aihara juxtaposed a thousand paintings from the South Korean Dansaekhwa abstract art movement on top of each other, rapidly cycling through dense expanses of color. Eventually, the view pulls back and we see faces and twisted fish emerge from the writhing mass, before we dive back into the depths. It’s mystifying, relaxing, and a beautiful demonstration of the possibilities of the moving image.

Aihara’s career is so fascinating because even though he’s got a strong history working on mainstream anime, much of what he’s remembered for is his experimental work. He was famously protective over his personal, experimental shorts, rarely allowing them to screen when he was alive. Getting to watch Black Fish feels like being let into the secret, rich inner world of an artist who dedicated his life to exploring form in its purest manifestation. —Ryan Waller

Tokyo Strut (dir. Masahiko Sato, Mio Ueta)

Before you even see a single thing in Tokyo Strut, you hear this incredibly drum heavy track kick in. It’s so rhythmic and it just makes you wanna dance. That’s because Tokyo Strut is telling you that the main star of this movie is the music.

Don’t misunderstand me though, the visuals are incredible. The first thing you see is a set of stationary dots moving but your brain doesn’t interpret them as isolated circles. Instead it’s as if you’re looking at a person and a dog, right down to the momentum of them swinging their limbs. This is really difficult to put into words, maybe more so than any other film I’ve seen, so I’ve created a .gif to capture this moment.

Do you see what I mean? There clearly isn’t a dog and a human walking here but your brain somehow manages to recognise them anyway. And to me, this technique really captures what makes film such an interesting medium.

In film, everything is fake and staged. But it’s creating an act of illusion to make you interpret the film as real. You know what you’re seeing is actors on a set but you’re fooled into investing your own emotions into them. Tokyo Strut boils down this specific aspect of film to its most bare essentials. It openly admits it’s trying to trick you, and then builds off that assumption.

As the film goes on, it starts playing with your brain’s ability to recognise images.

These shapes are so far removed from our idea of what a dog or a human is, so it raises the question, what’s left? And the only thing it can be is the rhythm. It’s taken all those living movements and transferred them onto simple lines. Tokyo Strut ends up personifying the rhythm that’s at the heart of the movie turning, it into a living, breathing creature. And it creates this incredible visual representation of what rhythm is. —Jai

Tokyo Girl (dir. Maho Shimao)

The looping animations superimposed on footage of city life in Tokyo Girl recall Muybridge motion studies in their satisfying brevity and iteration. They're basic units for Shimao to play with: there are often multiples of the same loop on screen, appearing at staggered times, from various angles, and/or with different paths/patterns of motion. Many are nudes, evoking a high art tradition—one that includes Muybridge—of the nude as an object for a disinterested (to a degree) aesthetic gaze. The copresence of the formal idealism of this gaze and the relaxed intimacy Shimao's nudes exude gives Tokyo Girl the charm of diary and fantasy both—a sketchbook quality; personal, but not reflexive.

The connection that the parallel planes of Tokyo Girl suggest between private imagination and urban rhythms seems, curiously enough, to point to a missing subject. While the title and opening shot (which shows two girls getting on their bicycles) conjure the thematic trope of "a girl, making it (or adrift) in the big city," all the subsequent footage is of traffic, without people in the foreground; no "girl in the city"—just the girl and the city. But the subject is, in fact, present: as the hand that draws, or the hand that holds the camera from inside a moving car. That space in between the parallel planes is, ultimately, one that Shimao reserves for herself. —Jinhyung Kim

Manipulated Man (dir. Atsushi Wada)

Manipulated Man's repetitive, meditative movement highlights the precise nature of the animation itself and heightens the oppressive tone of the subject. Atsushi Wada's color palettes are developed from the paper he draws on–washed, neutral beiges, browns, whites, yellows and grays add to the muted, simplistic style. His characters maneuver in a tempered, restrained manner, a purposeful smallness in their movement. They occupy little space (despite their rotund, bulbous faces) with thin outlines and most of the screen left blank, which creates a sense of inescapable obscurity. Accompanied by minimal sound, recurring breaths, knocks, and occasional tones from (what I assume is) a marimba create a rhythm. Struck by these distinct qualities while watching, I was lulled yet spellbound by a kind of muffled psychedelia. The manipulated man's mouth is opened and closed by another and he is saddled with three additional men attached horizontally, weighing his body. What emerges from his mouth when opened are other smaller men, birthed (fully grown and clothed) from his throat and spat out into the world to be controlled or perhaps to control, as they are dressed as the oppressor. A seemingly general meditation on censorship, lack of authority over one's own voice, or the pressure to conform in Japanese society. Will he ever escape? —Olivia Hunter Willke

Fishing Vine (dir. Mika Seike)

The cacophony of Fishing Vine is its greatest asset. Layers of textures —drawings, photographs, cutouts, leaves —intersect and interlace on the screen. Like Yamamura, her process of rendering still art into motion is laid bare as we see the frames shift from sequence to sequence. Seike’s texturally diverse style relates a parable-like fable about a man attempting to spy on a woman eating fruit from a tree through a small telescope. Yamamoto’s insistent clunking mechanical soundtrack thuds along, emphasizing his voyeuristic anxiety, before the woman makes eye contact with the spying man. The music ramps up here, and we are thrust into a series of fast-moving scenes where he attempts to climb one of the vines to reach her, only to find himself blocked by a crowd of identical men doing the same.

Seike’s usage of distancing through the abstraction of her character’s movements and the varying dimensional surfaces of her materials brings the story and its implications of feminism, surveillance, and futility into clear view. Her collage-like style provides a haunting intensity to every frame. When the woman looks at the voyeur directly, her flat facial expression and wooden movement cross into the uncanny valley, no doubt on purpose. We’re meant to be disturbed, because what’s going on and what she’s reacting to are disturbing. The man’s eventual rejection of this single-minded pursuit of her, after watching a bug cut off the vines which the lookalikes attempt to scale several times, results in the woman throwing fruit playfully at him, which grows into a tree of its own. Yet the narrative wraps around at the end, and we see another crowd of voyeur men with their own telescopes. The cycle of intrusion upon the woman’s peace and privacy continues, without a lesson learned. —Ryan Waller

Dog & Bone (dir. Kotobuki Shiriagari)

In 2004, a video was uploaded to the internet. The quality was low—it always was back then—pixels eating up the image into semi-abstracted digital noise. Uploaded by a teenager under the name SuperYoshi, it showed recorded footage of the Super Mario Bros Super Show, only something was wrong. The scenes were clipped and out of order, gags repeated ad nauseum and dialogue turned borderline incomprehensible. It was surreal and strange, like nothing else on the platform, and it wouldn't take long for it to change internet humor forever. 

The video’s title was Recycled Koopah, and it was the world’s first YouTube Poop.

This didn’t come entirely out of nowhere—the late ‘90s and early ‘00s were a wild breeding ground for a very specific style of comedy, one that could only thrive in the lawless lands of the internet. Sites like Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep propagated loud, extreme amateur flash animation, while boards like 4chan (shudder) developed a dense language of self-referential memes. It was a time of absurdism and nihilism, of wild zigs and even wilder zags. 

Dog & Bone feels like it exists in that same world. A totally out-there mixed media animation from 2006 by Shiriagari Kotobuki, it is a short that thrives on nonsense, following a rotoscoped person with a real photo of a dog for a head walking through obstacles in a poorly sketched world of pencil. One after another, bizarre non-sequiturs rush past the screen: one moment the cut-out of a woman is dancing and shooting paper hearts at the dog-man, the next they are running into a movie ala Sherlock Jr. before being assaulted by missiles and wandering into live-action footage. It is weird and confounding and gleefully dumb. It is also, like YouTube Poops and so much of the internet’s bizarre humor, uproariously funny.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Kotobuki has been a fixture of comedy manga since the late ‘80s, his fiendishly clever, gut-busting satires regularly appearing in transgressive, forward-thinking publications like Comic Beam and AX—places that pride themselves in side-stepping mainstream conventions and giving a home to modern hetauma.

There’s no fully agreed upon criteria for what makes something hetauma, but the basics are as simple as can be: it has to be bad but good (hetauma literally a portmanteau of Japanese words meaning bad and good). Whether that be on purpose or accident or simply thanks to a lack of formal training, hetauma challenges and defies the broadly accepted conventions for what makes art valuable. The artwork might be incredibly amateur, and the story might not follow any logical structure, but hetauma work transcends, revealing the futility of attempts to quantify art.  

YouTube poops, then, are hetauma. Memes and internet comedy are hetauma, with their purposefully deep-fried .jpegs, audio peaks, and anti-joke punchlines. The world we live in now, the one shaped by the internet, is hetauma.

And so is Dog & Bone. It is a short that, for an international audience, has aged into itself, its Dadaist comedy stylings finally in step with the wider world. It’s stupid and dumb and makes perfect sense, because it understands the purpose and value of art in the way only hetauma can. Technical proficiency isn’t important. Complexity doesn’t matter. Art doesn't have to be “profound,” just like it doesn't have to be “moving,” or even “good.” It simply has to be.

What could be more valuable than that? —Baxter

Nuance (dir. Murata Tomoyasu)

Nuance taps into a feeling so simple, but one that I’ve struggled to put into words for years: life is too busy. The film starts by showing you all of these images of Tokyo, but they’re always rendered multiple times—in one scene, there’s a bunch of vehicles shown crossing the motorway, but they’re continuously redrawn with different art and different colours. Each frame is gone before you can even really pay attention to it, and it just blends into the next. It’s a very specific recreation of what it’s like to live in a city. You see all these stimuli flying by but you never stop to consider it.

Nuance really highlights how much we take for granted day-to-day. A city is a crazy thing to describe on paper. The idea to condense a large amount of people into a tiny urban environment is fundamentally absurd. Even from a plumbing perspective that sounds like a nightmare. You’d think under compressed conditions like that, it would force people together, but the opposite is true instead. You end up getting into fights because someone is walking slightly slower than you.

About halfway through Nuance, the city fades away completely, and we’re left with these drawings of people walking through pure black. They’re all ignoring each other and keeping to themselves and they’re all drawn as incredibly dull colours—greys, blues, browns. They’re all colours of isolation. It’s like the vibrancy of their life has been completely drained from their bodies. We get so used to living in our environments that the colour starts to fade.

At least to a certain degree, Nuance reminds me of how repetition and routine can dull down our senses if we don’t try to fight back against it. As we walk the same paths—take the same commute day-in day-out—we start to put up shields to protect us. There are times where I’ve rode the tube in London completely zoned out just waiting to get to my stop. In this weird zombie state, I can change tube lines, listen to music, and tap in and out at the station. During all of this, I never stop to consider what a miracle it is that I can do this. What keeps the cycle of the city running? What keeps me running?

I’m so focused on moving, and trying to get to the next destination, that I forget to enjoy my journey there. It’s like I’m chasing inertia itself. I never stop to smell the roses. Although to be fair, in London it’s more likely to be the smell of a festering rat carcass instead. —Jai

Hashimoto (dir. Taku Furukawa)

Four months ago, Youtube commenter @ArthurBecker-fc6ug watched Motione Lumine (1973) on YouTube. Released decades before Hashimoto (2006), Lumine is similarly abstract. The film consists of around 3 minutes of animated star clusters twisted into humanoid forms, galaxies and nebulas leaping through the vast emptiness of space over an unnerving synth soundtrack. It’s eerily gorgeous and genuinely impressive in how it manages to anthropomorphize handfuls of light.

I watched it alongside a few other of Furukawa’s shorts after watching Hashimoto. I loved it, to be honest. Here’s what our good friend Arthur thought:

This is one of my favorite YouTube comments of all time. Everything about it sings to me: The thought of some guy stumbling upon a 50-year-old Japanese avant-garde animated short film with barely 200 views, watching it in full, and then half-heartedly writing this in response has brought me ample joy since I made my discovery.

It’s also a good excuse to force myself to think about why I do like these films, and why I pestered my friends with a link to Coffee Break (1972) with no comment beyond “this kicks ass.” It’d be easy to just call Arthur a stupid moron who doesn’t get it. (Which, to be fair, Arthur is. Shut the fuck up, dude.) On the other hand, I find it really valuable to try and articulate what an experimental film does for you in response to a half-hearted dismissal like Arthur’s, even when you can’t clearly parse those feelings. Unlike narrative film, you can’t fall back on plot or character writing. You’re forced to try to boil down a very personal, sensory experience into something digestible.

After sitting with this for a bit, I came to this: Furukawa understands that animation doesn’t have rules. There are no sets or actors to lock in, no pesky rules of physical space to get in your way. It’s just what’s being drawn, and that can change at any moment. Throughout Hashimoto, the scratchy humanoids smoking in a train station explode into rats and crows at a moment’s notice, screaming at each other and ultimately killing (?) one person after combining into a spiky glob of ink. I love that glob of ink. It’s anarchic in the non-arguing-on-Twitter sense, bursting with energy and possibility. Coffee Break functions in the same way and is somehow even more chaotic, where every new sip of coffee reveals even a new suite of drawings and colors to luxuriate in.

I don’t know how you could watch Hashimoto or Coffee Break and not come to the conclusion that Furukawa loves this shit. There is a love and care for what animation can do, from the chaos of Hashimoto to the more sedate, contemplative Motion Lumine, which feels almost like an experiment in context—if I do this, will it work? 

That makes all of Furukawa’s films engaging and straightforwardly fun to watch. It makes me happy to feel like I’m sharing in his love of the craft just by spending a few minutes with a work.

It’s nice ,i guess? —jeddy

Funkorogashi (dir. Yoji Kuri)

When I was a kid, my parents read me children's books in both Korean and English. One of the Korean books I remember best is one my dad liked reading to me, because it appealed to his scatological sense of humor: a mole wakes up one day to find resting atop his head a sculpture-perfect stool specimen which, to his chagrin, he cannot identify. The story consists of his going around to ask his animal friends, one by one, whether the stool is theirs; each, of course, helpfully provides their own stool as proof to the contrary, until the mystery finally resolves upon the mole's encounter with the culprit.

Funkorogashi—a short about dog poop, of all things—seems to tap into this specific sense of humor; the picture-book style of the animation, which relies on simple drawings and just a few alternating frames to express movement in most scenes, reinforces the association. The dogs here (and their owners) vary in color, shape, demeanor, and fashion in ways both comically apposite and (comically) not to their stool. I'm now slightly more convinced that "fecal typology" describes a microgenre of storytelling, derivative of the broader form of list-as-narrative-structure that prevails in children's literature—what easier way to teach the names of animals or colors, or the alphabet?

Given its unconcern for anatomical attention to detail, "Funkorogashi" isn't so didactic; nor does it have a mystery tying the plot together. Its focus is how dog shit imbricates a metropole: it violates the alleged propriety of the land of the bourgeoisie—a propriety their pets, of course, fail to recognize. As the film goes on, dog shit not only piles up on streets and lawns but gets onto plates, into beds, and atop heads, before agglomerating into a critical mass of cascading poop that swallows people whole. It possesses an insurgency that embodies the bourgeois nightmare of having to actually deal with the waste civilization produces—or rather, of finding ourselves without the marginalized labor and infrastructure that disappears that waste and makes our lives possible. Funkorogashi adds a dash of irony by revealing the bourgeoisie to lack the propriety their aversions are meant to show: in one scene, a woman hikes her skirt up to waist level (and panty visibility) to tiptoe through a field strewn with droppings. It's details like these that sharpen the edge of what are otherwise gross(ly entertaining) absurdities. —Jinhyung Kim

Yuki-chan (dir. Kei Oyama)

They wouldn’t let me through the doors, so the photo of her in the hospital bed was all I knew. Look closer: see a Kodak image of a blonde woman swallowed by a blossoming medical gown, grinding her teeth through discomfort to gleam a smile as a signal for her young son. Now a slow dissolve to the reverse side of those steel doors: check me out sitting in the lobby, a portrait of the author as a little squirt, flanked by my aunts and father, pawing that snapshot whenever I grow tired of re-reading my creased issues of Mad and Cracked in a pique of boredom mixed with incomprehension. My family had the photo rush-developed so I could still look at my mother while she was shut away from us during her extended medical stay. My consciousness as I understand it began somewhere around here; that picture of my mother lying prone in the clinic undergoing ureteroscopy both a first persistent memory as well as an induction in the ways of living and dying, of the fleeting distance between the two. Kei Oyama’s contribution to the Tokyo Loop omnibus, the animated short Yuki-chan, seeks to capture these sense memories associated with a child’s bewildering initial meeting with mortality.

At Yuki-chan’s outset, the audio track, conceived by Seiichi Yamamoto, hums with droning waves and the looping burbles of shuffling clicks and pops akin to the sound of Morse code. A little boy’s shadow is cast on the sidewalk, falling atop an earthworm bristling down the ground, the soundtrack mirroring the slow crawl. A mosquito lands on the boy’s hand; he crushes it, stares at the bug’s collapsed frame, then pokes the worm with a stick, lifting it for close study. A woman appears—a messenger from the adult world—and leads the boy’s hand inside the confines of a home where grown folks mill in stances of mourning and anticipation. Entering the next room, the boy meets a woman suspended in vigil over the pale corpse of a young girl, eyes bound by the telltale pockets of one who has wept severely. She speaks to the boy, though we do not hear her words, and caresses the forehead of the decedent before her. At the woman’s apparent urging, the boy does the same, his arm’s hesitant movement rhyming with the motions undertaken in the insects’ sidewalk world moments before. As the boy feels the girl’s forehead, he notices a weltering bite on his hand, a souvenir from the mosquito. Unexpectedly distracted, the boy prods at his sore and the scene ends. 

Kei Oyama’s animations draw upon the fine grains of textures found upon gravel, upon the epidermis, from memories of Camille Pissarro’s canvases, from panes of machined glass—in Yuki-chan, the earthworm’s body is that of Oyama’s own skin scanned from his fingers, while the face of the dead girl who haunts the piece is crafted from his then-partner’s skin. In his work, we are in the presence of a sort of neo-impressionism wedded to a kind of covert scrapbooking; a suggestion of what unconscious autofiction may resemble. Yuki-chan presents a childhood cosmos rendered as pavement and domestic pathway, a liminal land drifting between comprehension and puzzlement, with the skittish movement of the figures and backgrounds here suggesting nothing so much as the blurred assemblage by which rods and cones of the human eye convert visual stimuli into significance.

If the pulsing movement of Yuki-chan’s animation reflects the process of seeing itself, that of information being decoded and understood, then the film itself provocatively seeks to trace the contours and outlines of formative memory. A single viewing of Yuki-chan was enough to excavate these buried early childhood memories of my earliest acquaintance with the stakes of death, of the senses imprinted upon that photograph of my mother in medical repose striking a hopeful stance for her son. One leaves this short work with awareness that the recall of memory is yet another hallway through which the visual excuses itself and meaning returns. It is to Yuki-chan’s esteemed credit that its halfway-excavated splinter of remembrance is a vivid meditation on the universal experience of youthful faculty without resorting to the cloying or traumatic. As with the photo of my mother in the hospital, the primal scene of Yuki-chan represents the necessarily limited scope of a child’s understanding and suggests that cinema may yet serve a similar role to the mosquito in drawing that which is nestled within closer to the surface. —Patrick Lynn Wilson

12 O’Clock (dir. Toshio Iwai)

An animator always needs to think about time. The illusion of animation hinges upon presenting a series of images in succession and fooling the viewer into believing there’s continuity between them. If they hit your eye too slowly, the trick doesn’t work and the result becomes a slide show. (And while slide shows, historically, have been used to connote continuity between still images, the invention of motion picture cameras made the magic lantern look primitive.) Rush through too quickly, and the suggestion of motion might still be believable, although it won’t feel natural. From one frame to the next, a decision must be made on the tempo the next image should be delivered. Modern cameras and computer timelines relieve artists of most of this pressure, but Toshio Iwai often chooses to make things difficult for himself by using the most primordial animation techniques.

Iwai’s first attempts at animation were hand drawn flipbooks, which require manually thumbing through every page to make the magic happen. Immediately, you’re forced to wrestle with the basic principles of the artform. Timing is limited by the speed you’re able to move the paper, associating each step with a physical property. Eventually, you might discover that smaller books flip more quickly and heavier paper is less inhibited by air resistance. To counteract the limitations of the object, you might learn to economize the use of your pages and intuit that certain crucial moments require more attention than the transitional points between them; you’ve independently discovered the concept of key frames and tweening. Doubtless, this instilled Iwai with an appreciation for pacing.

As his craft evolved, he gradually incorporated more computer technology into his work but kept pre-film techniques in his repertoire. His first art installation, Time Stratum I, projected the motion of hands and eyes with a reel of photographs printed on rolling cylinders. Its sequel, Time Stratum II, was a zoetrope of paper dolls endlessly dancing around a carousel as they spun on a rotating disk. For these to work, the speed and position of the objects needed to be meticulously calibrated so that the spell holds at any viewing angle.

In 12 O’Clock, Iwai returns to the methods that taught him how to make pictures come alive; he uses a series of phenakistiscopes—the first ever technique for simulating fluid motion—superimposed onto the face of an analog timekeeper. Like the zoetrope, a phenakistiscope takes advantage of the human eye’s tendency to focus on a singular position so that you see a procession of images in one place rather than a scatter of them in multiple locations. And because a phenakistiscope is flat, the illusion doesn’t break when it’s filmed—provided it’s captured at the correct framerate. As the clock’s second hand ticks to the 12 o’clock position, you hear that Seiichi Yamamoto’s score is perfectly synced to the rhythm of its real time ticking—and keeps step even as the hands begin to spin rapidly. Each full revolution of the minute hand marks a change in scene, with 60 minute intervals whizzing by in about 8 seconds. It’s a visual representation of the most fundamental tenet of animation and a reminder that, for Iwai, time is of the essence. —Shy Clara Thompson

Thanks for reading this tenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Long time no see, yeah?

Huge thanks to my friends for graciously making the time to watch these films and share their thoughts. They’re all brilliant people, and I’ve shared links to their socials in their signatures. (Unless they didn’t want me to!) I’ve also decided to share some of their work at the bottom of the post, so please have a look if you want more things to check out. I’m endlessly inspired by the amazing things they do.

If you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link below and donating. You can do it one time, or as a monthly membership if you really love me. I’ll see you next time. Thanks!

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Blogroll

• Baxter runs his own newsletter called Tsundoku Diving, covering cool esoteric Japanese media. He also regularly does his own translations of alternative manga and film, doing proper diligence and giving you the history.

• Jai makes incredibly well-researched video essays about television and film on YouTube. After a year of plugging away, their channel has finally blown up with a wild retelling of the finale of Two and a Half Men.

• Jinhyung Kim writes a quarterly column about the best sound poetry releases for Bandcamp Daily. I appreciate him being super tapped into this stuff because it makes life a lot easier for me.

• Joshua Minsoo Kim runs the Tone Glow newsletter, which I also contribute to. He’s done hundreds of interviews with musicians and filmmakers and is one of the best doing it.

• Shy Clara Thompson writes this very newsletter (hello!) and does culture writing in various places. Mostly recently, I put together a primer of ’70s Japanese folk and wrote an extensive guide to eccentric interpretations of Erik Satie for a neat little site called Shfl.

• Ryan Waller runs their own newsletter called Vacant World, covering whatever fascinates them. I especially love their treatise on the state of modern hip-hop.

• Olivia Hunter Willke writes about film and programs her own screenings in Chicago. Recently, she did an interview with filmmaker Joel Potrykus for Tone Glow.

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P.S. Here are the albums I was listening to while doing the boring work of putting this post together:

• Akiko Wada - Zenkyoku-shū ~ Datte Shōganai Jyanai (1989)

• Bobby Hutcherson - Cirrus (1974)

• Boris with Michio Kurihara - Cloud Chamber (2008)

• Kuniharu Akiyama - Environmental Music for Dining Room of Athletes' Village in Tokyo Olympics 1964 (2016)

Something doesn’t truly become a tradition until you’ve managed to do it a second time, right? When I posted my original buddy list exactly one year ago, I wrote that I was going to cultivate this newsletter as a space to explore my own interests. I wasn’t entirely sure I meant it; I’ve got a lot of incomplete projects and unfulfilled ideas, and it was possible that this would be no different. I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to in that time, but hey—aspirations don’t have to die just because you don’t get to them on schedule. I did plenty, so I deserve to celebrate.

A lot has changed since then. Some of my friendships have gotten stronger, and some have grown distant. To a degree, this collection of writing reflects that. I’ve tapped some friends that contributed last year to return, but not all. Some were busy with life and I didn’t want to bother them. Some probably would have agreed, but I felt anxious troubling them again. Some of the new names are people I wanted to ask last time. Some I decided to approach on a whim. There’s no method to it, really. Like celestial bodies, everyone’s got a gravitational force that’s constantly pulling against others in ways that are difficult to predict; this is simply how the planets aligned.

I’ve invited eight dear pals to reflect on their trip around the sun and share some experiences that stuck with them. The moments spent conversing with friends and trading excitement are, as ever, what keeps me going. I wanted to share a bit of what I love about them, but nothing I say could possibly do them justice. Instead, I’ve given them the space to be themselves and say whatever they want about how they’ve spent their time. I think it comes through why I feel so warmly about each of them. They’re all into cool stuff and show me new and exciting things almost daily. Hopefully something shared here piques your interest too. :->

(By the way: I didn’t tell so many of them to mention me. 😭)

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Baxter

2023 was a year of movement and statis. It was the same as every year in the sense that it was nothing like any other year. It’s the year I finally realized dreams I’ve had since the first grade, and realized that doesn’t change a thing, not really; a year where I have evolved dramatically but remain disappointingly me. But that’s life, huh! And hey, as much as the year felt like the temporal equivalent of squatting beside a river and watching all the water rush by, it was also a good one—one of the best for me, maybe! Plus, importantly for this post, it was one with a whole lot of soul-altering experiences with art. 

Top 10 experiences with art in 2023 that rewrote who I am on a molecular level (in absolutely no order)

1. Writing — I started the year getting a short story published for the first time, ended it with my first freelance gig (where, in a historic first, I earned money…for writing???), and in the middle of all that started a newsletter/blog where I put up around 30k words of art criticism! All very cool. But really, what made writing so satisfying in 2023 has been all the amazing people I’ve met because of it (people like Shy!!).

2. Ice skating — Despite the ice, this is one of the hottest, most passionate sports there is. People voguing, wearing Attack on Titan cosplay, and drifting through ambient strings while caught in a delicate balancing act of improv and rehearsal, emotional expression and athletic perfectionism. Everyone should be into ice skating.

3. A salt rice ball — This year I got COVID! And then I got shingles! While I was sick and stuck inside, my girlfriend left some food at my door, including a homemade salt rice ball, which is exactly what it sounds like—just rice and salt and nothing else. It was, without question, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.

4. Thriller: A Cruel Picture — Shoutout to Evil Movie Night, a little group of my best online friends made so we could watch movies that wouldn’t be appropriate in larger Discord servers. The highlight this year? Thriller: A Cruel Picture, an ice-cold Swedish arthouse revenge flick the director claimed was supposed to be the most commercial movie ever made. He might be the dumbest man alive. The moment the film smash cuts to actual hardcore pornography, me and my friends suddenly staring a winking butthole in the face, is one of the most shocking, embarrassing, and hilarious movie viewing experiences I’ve ever had. A movie that is permanently part of my vocabulary now.

5. Disneyland — Look, I’m not a Disney guy and I’d be very fine if our evil media conglomerate overlord bit the dust, but when Mickey Mouse draws an air heart around you and your partner smiles bigger than you knew it was even possible to smile, I mean, what are you supposed to do? 

6. Les Vampires — I’d seen about half of Les Vampires, the 1915 French serial before, but this was the year I finally went all in, and friends, I am obsessed. I’m a full-blown Feuillade fanatic now. Wildly imaginative and surreal and exciting and obscenely entertaining and deeply complex under the surface. All TV for the past 100 years has just been a desperate attempt to recreate what Feuillade did. None of them have ever gotten close. 

7. Kaleidoscope museum — What I thought would be a mildly-amusing diversion turned out to be a glorious little adventure of light and color radiating childlike glee and wonder. The kaleidoscope is such a playful creation with infinite potential. Picking a favorite from the place is tough, but it might have to be the old man sitting in his boxers and staring at an orb, the kaleidoscope hidden in a hole in the back of his head.

8. The Adolescence of Utena — Me and a friend watched this sequel/retelling of probably the greatest anime of all time three times in a row one night. And if I hadn’t had to work the next day, I could’ve easily watched it three more times. A perfect circle; a donut movie that gives and gives and inspires obsession.

9. Magino Village: A Tale — A mammoth four-hour documentary about rice farming that’s actually about everything. Went into the movie as one person, came out as another, suddenly seeing the history and holiness in my home, in the dirt, in every grain of rice I eat. Monumental; one of the greatest, most vital films ever made.

10. Top 5 Manga of 2023, because manga is good and I’ve grown closer to the medium this year than I ever have been before — Happiness Comes From Eating Sleeping and Waiting, Umibe no Stove, Ink-iro no Yoku wo Haku, Hikou Bungaku, Fool Night

Jai

More than anything these days, I find myself thinking my biggest opponent in life is myself. Earlier this year I read Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play, and something in that really got under my skin: a core theme in the narrative is how the main character Willy Loman can’t confront that time is passing with every second. Despite being married and having a child in his 30s, Willy refuses to accept the material conditions of his life—he believes all his dreams and desires will come true while making zero steps towards them.

I think, for years, I was Willy Loman. Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself, I also have my fair share of interests—I weight lift, I think I’m a pretty good video editor, and I’m proud of the work I’ve written. That being said, my aspirations have always been higher. I’ve wanted to entertain people for most of my life and, if possible, teach them something along the way. I had been juggling the idea of making YouTube videos for years, but in 2023, I actually did it. I made a few lengthy ones! And I’m incredibly proud that I actually managed to break through the mental barrier I had.

No man is an island though, and more than anything, I am incredibly grateful for the fantastic friends and family I’ve had support me through the year. I’ve grown so close to so many great people, and I find myself wanting to make great things, not for myself, but so I can share them with those around me. I’m thankful daily that I can message people randomly to talk about Will Smith’s oeuvre, or even have a community around me that’ll understand the juxtaposition of “oeuvre” and “Will Smith” as a joke. 

I would be lying if I said I could’ve done this by myself. I suppose I wrote and edited the videos, but it was the fact that those around me saw something in me that I couldn’t. They were so generous and forthcoming with their time to help me grow into a better person. I’m incredibly grateful to know them. They taught me a very valuable lesson: it’s hard to get started, but once you’ve got momentum, it’s harder to stop.

For those who talk to me, or watch my videos, or whatever else, know this: I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly convey how much your support means to me. Here’s to another year of finally getting out of our own ways. As hard as it is these days, I hope you do the same.

Top 5 Graphic Novels/Manga I Read in 2023

• Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka

• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

• Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

• Ashizuri Suizokukan by panpanya

My 10 Favourite Films I Saw for the First Time in 2023, But Did Not Come Out in 2023

• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (dir. Nagisa Ōshima, 1983)

• To Sleep So As To Dream (dir. Kaizo Hayashi, 1986)

• Barton Fink (dir. Joel Coen, 1991)

• Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (dir. Katsuhito Ishii, 1998)

• Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (dir. David Mamet, 1996)

• Sanjuro (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

• The Color of Money (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1986)

• Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

• When We Were Kings (dir. Leon Gast, 1996)

• Catch Me If You Can (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2002)

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Kei

For the longest time now, I have had an affinity towards things “of the moment.” Albums released this year, anime airing this season, games that are having their time in the spotlight. I really do get swept up in all of it, and I’ve made it my goal to sift through sand to find my favorites. Despite the way I’ve stuck to this outlook, the way that I have interacted with almost everything online has changed in recent times. When I went to look back at things I posted throughout the year on social media, it didn’t take much time at all for me to scroll through the entire year on my media tab. I have noticed that I don’t post as much about things I love openly anymore, and it’s just hard to wear my heart on my sleeve in the same ways I used to take pride in. It’s not that they don’t happen though. I’m still out here. That’s why I’m so happy Shy invited me to write about some of those things here. I was so excited, even, that I went and wrote a staggering amount of words that would have totally busted the symmetry of everyone’s posts. So, if you feel so inclined, I put the original version up here at a Substack I have literally just opened as of now. 

That being said, let’s give this list an outline! If I had to pick a single way to describe this year, it would be “surprises.” Which is pretty nice given that I feel I lacked a plan for it. The following is my favorite currents I followed this year—Events I got to experience, Media of the moment, Observations I got to make along the way, or Parties I was late to. 

1. all in a day’s walk — Life can be noisy sometimes. A quiet afternoon and a lot of walking can really do wonders for the mind. 

2. overly susceptible to advertising (Heaven Burns Red) — Akihabara. Onoden Building 4th floor COSPA. Just enough Lemondou chuhai to feel like nothing will ever go wrong. 4 t-shirt purchases later I have drafted myself into playing Jun Maeda’s big game. It’s on trains. It’s on automobiles. It’s in the train station. I figured out why as soon as I heard Before I Rise on the title screen.

3. TOKYO MX PRESENTS Healing Time — Somehow there has been an iyashikei headline news program every night at bedtime in Tokyo, and nobody ever told me about it. 

4. Hello and Goodbye: A Dance Evolution Arcade Story — I started learning how to dance because of arcade games. One of them was dead and turned offline before I even started playing it. Late at night, so far in the depths of the city, on the 6th floor of a monolithic shopping mall, in the far corner of an empty arcade, was that same game—running in online mode. I may never get to experience playing the game in networked format again, and I tried to take it in as much as possible. Just a few weeks later, not missing a beat on instituting order for the cruel indifference of the universe, my local arcade orders our cabinet to be taken down and put out of commission.

5. the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come should have just showed me this anime (accidentally discovering MyGO and also Remorse) — I used to be particularly mean, for no reason other than to fit in, towards this media mix project. You can imagine the regret years when the band I stumbled upon through a Tower Records display was part of that project. MyGO lit up my year. Their unveiling and subsequent anime announcement, later to be referred to by Yahoo Japan News as “Reiwa’s Most Depressing Anime,” so many more great live events, and even supplemental materials have kept me going through 2023. I just hope I can make up for being such an ass back then.

6. still chanting in-n-out at the top of my lungs (Walküre Final Live) — I wouldn’t be the same without Walküre. All it took was hearing that first “Ikenai Borderline” to convert me. They tipped so many dominoes over in my life, and it was the least I could do to drive a long distance just to watch an official delayed viewing in a theater. My hardships (driving through the state of Ohio) paled in comparison to the effort these girls put in throughout this tour. My first delayed viewing, and also my first time seeing a group I loved retire. I’m just thankful I had penlights this time.

7. Breaking out of The Algorithm (does anyone have some cdjs we can borrow) — It took years for me to dust off the DJ controller I bought in the midst of the pandemic. I was particularly inspired by seeing KZ perform on a livestream and the rest was history. It turns out that picking that up was the key to making good on my brazen claim that I would “get back into music in 2023.” Really what I meant was that I wanted to be more active about listening, and it’s something I’m glad to have accomplished. Further thanks to 4s4ki, DENONBU, lil soft tennis, She is Legend, PAS TASTA, Tomori Kusonoki, Nagase Yuka, Cerise Bouquet, DOLLCHESTRA, Ohzora Kimishima, Ave Mujica, and of course, MyGO!!!!!

8. I Got Government Assigned These School Idols (Link! Like! Love Live!) — If I were to send myself a message back in time a year ago and claimed I would get back into Love Live, particularly through an “active time school year long livestream and low budget 3D models storyline”, I’d have thought the message was complete bullshit. Strange as it is, it’s been exciting to follow considering it is just on-going every day. Seeing the wave of excitement slowly build online over these girls has been a riot to watch unfold. 

9. gaijin jumpscared at the coco ichibanya (THE IDOLM@STER M@STERS OF IDOL WORLD!!!!! 2023) — Bandai Namco’s Idolm@ster Royal Rumble was an event I could never have conceived, even in my dreams. I ended up in seats on the very bottom of the upper bowl of the Tokyo Dome, unable to stand due to safety rules, but by god I had one of the best views in the house. My highest heart rate for the entire year was likely hearing the opening melody to “Hanazakari Weekend✿”. I hadn’t even heard “Saku-wa Ukiyo-no Kimi-HANABI” before but the amount of UOs popped for it sure will give it a place in my memories forever. Perhaps the most memorable moment was after the second day of the event. A few drinks deep after the concert while waiting in line at a curry restaurant, I noticed that the older Japanese gentleman in front of me had pins of my favorite character (Cinderella Girls Idol Nono Morikubo) on his bag. I believe I must have given him the biggest white man jumpscare of his entire life when I complimented him on them, getting a full triple take to confirm that I indeed had merch from the event on. It’s moments of international idol unity like getting back a “let’s keep trying hard as her Producer” that make it all seem worth doing. 

   
   In summary: I heard M@STERPIECE live, I’m never going to fail.

10. “ohhhhhhhh so that’s what those girls are from, I wasn’t sure” game of the year 2023 (Blue Archive) — It would be a difficult task to avoid Blue Archive, if you run in the same subcultures and niches I do. It’s hard to understand the appeal at a material level. Sure, the music is incredible. Sure, the character and world designs are super modern and full of details. You just need more to survive in the hellishly competitive big social game landscape these days. I went in intending to discover what it was that was so special about this game, why it had built such incredible numbers and gained so much fanfare. It was over for me as soon as they invoked a few tiny scrimblos responsible for making kusoge thanking a robot they kidnapped for enjoying the bad games they made. I followed it through to the final chapter and it ended up being my favorite game this year.

Jinhyung Kim

My life has changed so rapidly and so consistently in the past few years that whenever I revisit any of the writing I’ve done or conversations I’ve had in that time, the selves I find feel impossibly distant—not unrelatable; just a gulf of experience removed. Pre-2020 feels like ancient history, and the older I get, the less I feel the need to draw a line of narrative continuity from past to present. But if I had to articulate one thing about myself that’s stayed stubbornly the same throughout my entire life, it’d be that I value friendships above all else. School, work, and nerd shit provide the general frameworks by which I structure my time, but it’s all second to (or for the purpose of) making and maintaining connections with people. That’s my fundamental source of happiness, and that's something that will never change. I used to think I cared more about art than I did about people; now, I don’t even bother pretending there's a line separating the two. Love you, Shy—thanks for helping me make it through one doozy of a year.

Ten Zines/Zine-y Things I Got in 2023

Last month, I attended the 2023 Houston Zine Fest; I first went in 2022, and both events were an indubitable highlight of my year—a real nexus for anyone who practices DIY in a city whose sprawl easily scatters chances for communal gathering. It felt even more special this time because I personally knew a lot of the vendors, mostly thanks to having met them through Basket Books & Art (where I work). Here’s a list of zine (or zine-adjacent) things I got—mostly via zine fest, but a few from other occasions (titles embedded with pictures!).

• Chris Cascio - Artifacts and Source Material, I - III (2011 - 16) — This guy’s made a lot of cool zines in a classic punk/“American Transgressive” mode that compile the iconography of things like sensationalist media, metal and rave subcultures, etc. These little zines are an unthematized selection of xeroxes, clippings, and other flim flam from the moldiest dregs of humanity.

• Izaac Costiniano/Redd Howard  - Hello Houston: Four Architectural Sites (2023) — My friends! Izaac’s a great photographer, and his partner Redd is an art historian (and ceramicist in formation, I believe?). They made a zine together featuring photography and writing on some of the city’s more subtle architectural quirks.

• Ian Gerson - Tremble (2023) — Ian’s recent work comprises explorations of historic queer night life in Galveston, TX; Tremble accompanies an exhibition of the same name featuring woven tapestries made with various found objects from the Galveston Bay area “as a way of centering the refused, the invisible, the marginal.”

• Harmony Korine/Mark Gonzales - Collected Fanzines (2008) — An early anthology of DIY sleaze by the ever-notorious Harmony Korine, published as a book by Drag City in 2008; these zines’ stark and simple presentation are a refreshing contrast to a filmmography whose approach to transgression can often be saturated and demanding.

• ed. Adam Marnie - F Magazine, Issue 6: “Sex” (2018) — Adam’s F Gallery + publishing project is one of the few art things based in Houston I’m consistently excited about; his longest-running output is F magazine, which invites contributors to submit an anything-goes gamut of art, poetry, essays, and experimental writing in response to the theme at hand.

• Dani Newman - Lonely Places (2022) — Dani’s a neighbor and erstwhile cafe buddy; this little photo zine is a document of her time living out of a car with her partner while on a road trip across the Great American West.

• Jessica Ninci - Window Shopping (2022) — Ian (Gerson—see above), Jessica, and Dan (Schmahl—see below) are all connected via the Galveston art community, as well as Dan’s publishing project Super Hit Press (all the work of theirs I’ve listed here was printed by Super Hit). Each spread of Jessica’s Window Shopping zine documents a trinket from a Galveston antique/thrift/local shop on the left and her ceramic recreation of it on the right.

• Grace Sydney Pham - A Glimpse Into the Houston Experimental Music Scene (2023) — Friend of a friend made this hardcover photo zine that features many a familiar face I’ve seen attending free improv shows ‘round H-town.

• Dan Schmahl - Let's Pretend (20??) — Dan’s an amazing Galveston-based artist and printer (and Jessica's partner); he downplays his own work too much, but his monochrome risographs are some of the most gorgeous things I've seen.

• Ann Weathersby - Reliquaries (2021) —Also published by F. A documentation of 14 reliquary boxes, each with a collage and a text, that present material personally important to Weathersby in the form of sacred objects.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Reflecting on any year is weird because you realize how much you experienced despite it all going so fast. I don’t really think I need to spend more time thinking about any of it though because I’m just ready to move on—not in the sense that 2023 was especially horrible (it was in various ways, both personally and not), but because I’m still in a mindset that has fueled me since I stopped being insanely depressed half a decade ago, which is that I’d prefer to just do things than think about them. Of course, a lot of the things I do are a result of careful consideration, but I’m always thinking about how little time we have in this little life. I’m just doing what I can.

Favorite Concerts of 2023

1. HiTech at Phố Việt in Chicago, 7/22

2. Underground Resistance at Nowadays in New York, 5/28

3. Still House Plants at First Church in Jamaica Plain in Boston, 3/26

4. Kath Bloom at the Hideout in Chicago, 10/14

5. Patti Smith at the Salt Shed in Chicago, 12/27

6. Richard Dawson at Public Records in New York, 3/28

7. Numero Twenty (specifically Unwound, Karate, Tsunami, Codeine, and The Hated) at the Palace Theater in LA, 2/18 & 2/19

8. Martin Dupont at the Brooklyn Monarch in New York, 5/28

9. NewJeans at Lollapalooza in Chicago, 8/3

10. Hermeto Pascoal at Pioneer Works in New York, 5/25

11. Agriculture at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, 11/2

Aspirations for 2024, Written on the Spot, in No Particular Order:

• Regularly work out and be more mindful of my health (benching 225 by the end of the year???)

• Keep Tone Glow consistently running (writers panel + film coverage especially)

• Learn how to swim (dear god please it’s time)

• Attend more avant-garde puppetry shows here in Chicago (and write about some of them???)

• Follow through on publishing the interviews I’ve conducted in the past

• Go to the Galapagos on a research trip with other science teachers (it’s now or never…)

• Visit Toronto and go through the film archives there (and especially going through Michael Snow’s archives)

• Do some film programming (hopefully of James Herbert’s works)

• Eat at more restaurants in Chicago so that I can map out the best places to eat for at least 15 different cuisines (within my budget…)

• Learn how to cook some cuisine I’ve never tried cooking before (most important thing on this list maybe???)

• Read more fiction (lol)

Saoirse

It’s been a frustrating one. I started the year lost, burnt out and directionless and in some ways I feel that’s where I'm leaving it. My mental health is worse than ever, but for once I feel like I've got the people around me to pull through.

I received an email from a university about course openings for their communications/Film course and applied on a whim. I’m a high school dropout, so didn’t expect to get in but I did—I absolutely threw myself at it. I took advantage of almost every opportunity. I’d spend hours in the library just researching for fun. My curiosity will never be satiated; I came close, though. For almost 6 months, it was the perfect environment to foster me. (I don’t know how I'll live without free access to academic papers when I graduate.)

God, the films I watched, nearly 300, it’s freakish, it’s twisted and this year it brought me closer to people than ever before. I volunteered for the local film festival. I go to a screening every week (Shoutout to C.U.M., the best cinema experience in Sydney). Film has given me a chance to unapologetically express myself and I'm forever grateful. I’ve met so many wonderful people this year, including my sweetheart.

Around July, I fell hard. My depression came back and everything became a struggle again. I don’t know what caused it, or if the miracle of (almost) dysfunction-free life was just mania, but I'm so glad it happened. It gave me the energy to immerse myself in community and find pockets of stability. It’s not my first walk around the block, and I’m sure clearer skies are ahead next year. Even if they’re not, I'll keep pushing through. I’ve never felt so loved and supported. Thank you all so very much. <3

The Media That Stuck With Me

• Yamaji Ebine’s manga — I tore through almost all of her available work during the early year malaise and I don’t think I’ve gone a day without thinking about her stories. There’s a little bit of me in all her protagonists. They’re stuck, dysfunctional and love-struck. Nobody is writing about young queer women like her.

• Girls of the Night (dir. Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961) — I found myself “out” more than ever this year. The ways this film forces its protagonist to navigate disclosure speaks to me viscerally. It’s heartbreaking, but for a moment she can slip into pure romanticism. “Just being treated so kindly is more than enough, it made me so happy”

• Paris Funeral 1972 (dir. Adam C. Briggs, 2021) — Had the pleasure of seeing this at my favourite local movie club. It’s nice to feel like there’s a creative present and future in Australian film production and film culture. The beautiful people that made both possible know who you are. I’m extremely proud to call you my friends.

• Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (dir. Kazuo Hara 1974) — Of all the diary films I watched this year, this was simultaneously the most self destructive, invasive and healing.

• The YouTube Upload: 本多俊之 - “マルサの女” / Toshiyuki Honda - Theme from “A Taxing Woman (Marusa no onna)” (uploader: Pure Jam, 2020) — YouTube made it a mission to put this at the top of my recommended tab almost daily. I clicked and listened to it more than I’d like to admit. Thank you Toshiyuki Honda for letting me channel Nobuko Miyamoto girlboss energy for late night study sessions.

Assorted Lovely Moments

• A beautiful drive down backcountry roads with my sweetheart. The best navigation mistake I’ve ever made.

• Getting to present a screening of Tourism (2017) accompanied by Q&A with Daisuke Miyazaki. When we wrapped up, a friend shouted “GO SAOIRSE!” It was just such a pleasure to get to contribute to such an important place for me.

• Selling a brand new friend on Tampopo, primarily with the egg scene and then suggesting we watch it then and there.

• I went swimming for the first time in years. I cried when I touched the ocean; I’ve missed it so much. It felt like I’d never go back. I’m so proud of myself.

Ryan Waller

I fell apart this year. Usually, I’m very apprehensive about going in depth about my emotional state, because I’m embarrassed of my emotions. I spiral out a lot; I feel bad, then I feel awful about feeling bad, then I start feeling about how it makes people I care about feel bad, then I think about how that makes me feel bad. And the spiral continues on and on. For a long time, I felt like I was beginning to develop a level of maturity that helped me to stabilize my emotional state and give me more strength to handle the world.

Then 2023 happened. I lost a wonderful friend; I lost my grandmother; and I lost so many heroes. It’s harder than ever to feel stable. Every single day, I wake up wanting to give up—and my end of the stick isn’t even the shortest.

In the face of the deep sorrows that have plagued me since the literal first week of this year, music has kept me afloat. Shy and I share the same passionate stance: every year is a good year for music. Yet I have to admit that this was a particularly incredible year for music. Tons of indispensable archival releases, like the previously unreleased Os Tincoãs album Canto Coral Afrobrasileiro, have bowled me over this year. Consistently brilliant artists like Klein and KMRU have stepped up their practices and delivered some of their best work yet. We’ve even gotten amazing returns from long dormant artists like Japanese gamelan-rock masters goat, and a sequel to a long beloved collaboration by Éric La Casa and Seijiro Murayama. It’s hard to want to be around these days, but the surplus of unbelievably great music this year has made it much, much more tolerable.

I love Shy, and if you’re reading this I’m sure you do too. I’m beyond ecstatic to have been called back to contribute to another buddy list. She’s so amazing, and I’m happy to be a part of what she does in any capacity. All of my friends keep me alive, and I love you all.

Top Ten Under-Discussed Albums of 2023 (By My Metric) (Unranked)

• goat (JP) - Joy in Fear — This band is absolutely disgusting. If you love Kukangendai, do not miss these guys’ long-awaited return. When I say math rock, this is what I mean.

• Aaron Dilloway - Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House — Dilloway is one of the most freeing artists to follow. Can think of few people who make field recordings more fun to listen to. Shouts out to Nepal.

• Me'Shell Ndegéocello - The Omnichord Real Book — The motherfucking greatest. Nobody can do it like her, as long as she’s done it. And she’s got a veritable who’s who of contemporary jazz on here. Would love to hear her chop it up with Makaya McCraven or Junius Paul sometime.

• Fielded - Plus One — A real motherfucking star. Everyone needs to run them up expeditiously. Backwoodz has had an amazing year, and Fielded is absolutely a huge part of that rich tapestry of excellence.

• Raja Kirik - Phantasmagoria of Jathilan — Yes No Wave is one of the best labels around, and if you appreciate experimental music that genuinely pushes the boundaries of what industrial music can sound like, you’d do well to familiarize yourself with Raja Kirik’s catalogue. Absolutely raw sounds on this one.

• Scúru Fitchádu - Nez Txada Skúru dentu skina na braku fundu — Can’t believe no one is talking about this. Probably the most genuinely punk thing you’ll hear all year. Folkloric tradition meets electronic wizardry is a huge draw for me and the atmosphere of fury and resistance imbues every howl with the utmost urgency.

• Edward Skeletrix - Skeletrix Langauge — If you’re seriously saying that hip-hop isn’t good anymore in current year, you will not survive the revolution.

• münki - ACT IIIL SMIL :3 — No seriously. Hip-hop has never been better.

• Vayda - Forrest Gump — And nobody proves that better than Vayda. She’s really the future.

• Sabiwa - Island no.16  - Memories of Future Landscapes — A rich and exciting fusion of EAI and indigenous Taiwanese folk that has me very excited to dig into the latter in the new year.

Patrick Lynn Wilson

Webster’s Dictionary defines 2023 as the number dating the year following 2022 and preceding 2024. In keeping with several of the authors featured here, I define it as a rough patch for me personally, but please notice the meringue layer of my despair pie is flecked with chocolate flakes from the sweet cacao tree of positivity. For while a large chunk of this year may have sucked, my friends and Shy were there to agree that it sucks with me, and then send me a link to a crusty YouTube vid of an old free jazz improv set featuring tabla, gong, and analog synth. I started out 2023 reeling from loss, slightly inert; as the year bows out, I find myself no longer reeling but surrounded by the comforts of a supportive and loving partner, a cozy reading nook, and what is sure to be a normal presidential election cycle in 2024. Shy, I couldn’t have made it through without you—and frankly, why would I want to?   

Patrick Lynn’s Top Albums of 2023 or Whatever:

1. PAS TASTA – GOOD POP — The most forward-thinking album of the year; the sound of a thousand envelopes pushed at once and pressing back with equal force.

2. Emma Aibara – i don't know who i am & sound of my ♡ EPs — Perfectly processed DnB pop on this bookend of EPs. Emma’s YouTube-uploaded breakcore covers of Evanescence’s “Going Under” and Kittie’s “Charlotte” were my songs of the summer. If you’ve ever cried at a Mitsubishi Eclipse ad from 2003, this is now the brightest star in your sky.

3. Peterparker69, Jeter, & Y ohtrixpointnever – Deadpool — Smeary hyperpop that tips its hat to the sonic qualities of today’s radio R&B, then twirls the hat around and does a little parallel shimmy.

4. Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd — Shows how one can effectively string their neuroses along their fingers like a cat’s cradle to major effect, while transgressing all manner of good taste in the process.

5. Summer Eye – 大吉 Good Luck — The year’s best dance pop jawn. And to think, I very nearly made it the entirety of 2023 without having to hear the words “LCD Soundsystem”.

6. XV – On the Creekbeds on the Thrones — Best and most cerebral rock LP of the year or whatever.

7. Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors — Late contender for best folk release of 2023, maybe even the nascent decade so far.

8. eleven thistles – demos — Absurdly accomplished set of debut demos from this Chicago ambient duo.

9. hoodie x james K – 065 (Scorpio) — My trip-hop revivalist jawn of choice this year.

10. J and the woolen stars – Personal Problems — When twee pop stops getting real and gets in a chamber music mode instead.

11. heartstopmiami & FearDorian – K.A.S.O.B. — Blown-out helium hyperrap built of wheezy saccharine energy and copious references to Betty Boop.

12. ML Buch – Suntub — A veritable Rorschach of an album; A future classic.

13. 100 gecs – 10,000 gecs — America’s house band.

14. Addison Rae – AR — A hermetically sealed vacuum of horny. Here, sex is the most oppressive and powerful force in existence.

15. audry – Turbulence Mapping — The death blues of a moth trapped in a screen door.

16. Run Along Forever & AyooLii – Crashing Tf Out — I love my fiends!

(Other releases I listened to heaps but don’t have room to write about: Jim Legxacy – HNPM; Gendo Ikari – ROKUBUNGI; Gridlink – Coronet Juniper; Tomb Mold – The Enduring Spirit; Ostraca – Disaster; Closet Witch – Chiaroscuro; Christian Mirande – Beautiful One Day, Perfect The Next; Laurence Crane – Natural World; SATOH – Born in Asia; Joanne Robertson – Blue Car; Liv.e – Girl in the Half Pearl; Emily Robb – If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection; Jack Sheen – Solo for Cello; Opheliaxz - 11//11)

Reissues/Archival Releases of the Year or Whatever

• Thomas Buckner sings Robert Ashley - Spontaneous Musical Invention

• Mag-Amplitude – Wizards of Today

• Easter Monkeys – Splendor of Sorrow

• Pitchman – My Angel Age

• Richter Band – Smetana

• Angus MacLise – Tapes

Lynn’s Shoe of the Year or Whatever

• Puma - Perks and Mini x Nano 'BIO/VERSE' — Dressing like a hippie so that others may hurl death threats at you is the highest calling we can hope to follow in this life; these flower-patterned sneakers make that so much easier to accomplish. Counter culture ain’t just for bacteria in the kitchen anymore...

Shy Clara Thompson

For most of the year, I felt like a powerless observer. A lot of things happened to me, and I was convinced that all I could do was curl up and take the abuse. I lost a friend and two family members. The relationship I’ve been in since high school ended. I fell in love again and got my heart broken just as swiftly. I didn’t feel equipped to handle any more misfortune, so I withdrew from being a participant in my own story. I stopped writing. I stopped listening to music, reading, and playing games. I stopped getting out of bed. I didn’t necessarily want to take my own life, but I did want to stop living. Wrapping myself in a chrysalis was my way to minimize the hurt.

Though no matter how hard I tried to opt out, some folks wouldn’t let me be. The editors I worked with kept asking where I’ve been and prodded me to share my ideas, even though I didn’t think they were worth shit. Friends kept checking on me if it had been too long since they’d heard from me. As I was increasingly giving less of myself, my loved ones were determined to tease as much out of me as possible. I have a habit of believing the moment I stop being interesting, I lose all value and there’s no reason anyone should care. Time and time again, I was reminded that I’m more than just my despair and a person worth loving still existed underneath the wreckage. I can’t possibly express my gratitude to everyone that refused to let me decompose and return to the earth. Sincerely: thank you. Your kindness has done more than you know.

I’m far from what I’d describe as “okay,” but I’m not on life support right now. I’ve managed to write some things I feel proud of in this final quarter of the year. My excitement for the arts is as strong as it’s ever been. I’m into cosplay now, I guess, which is something I never thought I’d be brave enough to try. I hesitate to slip into the cliché of “2024 is my year,” because it’s not like life lets up just because the calendar rolls over—but I think I’ll be fine. At the very least, I’m probably a little better prepared to handle it.

One Extremely Good Comic Book You Should Read

• Optometry (Xiang Yata, 2023)

Ten Non-2023 Albums I Heard (and Loved) This Year

• Beilkhan Haliakbar - Air Walk (Modern Sky World, 2018)

• Blue Asia - Hotel iBAH (Seven Seas, 2001)

• Electric Satie - Gymnopédie '99 (Roux, 1998)

• Harry & Mac - Road to Louisiana (Epic, 1999)

• Maki Asakawa’s entire discography

• Mathey - Clépo (Lusafrica, 1996)

• Motoya Hamaguchi Group - Takara・Monde (Panam, 1990)

• Ray Kāne & Yuki Alani Yamauchi - Maika'i No Blues (Respect Record Ltd., 1999)

• Tank - Force of Nature (Blackground Enterprises, 2001)

• Xerinay Malik - Xerinay Malik (太合麥田, 1996)

Thanks for reading this ninth installment of once bitten, twice shy. A huge thanks to my pals that have generously given their time and effort to make this one special. You are the best. I’ve cut the amount of contributions from nine to eight this time, and there’s a reason for that: It didn’t feel right to “replace” my departed friend Nicky, so I’ve left the spot open for them. It’s important to me that I keep finding small ways to show my appreciation.

I’ve come a bit short of my original goal of (at least) one post a month, but I didn’t give up! I’m proud of myself for that. There’s a solid four months where I didn’t publish anything at all, and for a while I thought the newsletter would die a quiet death. I’m thankful that you’re still reading. I’ve got more stuff for you in the new year if you wanna keep sticking with me.

By the way, today’s my birthday! If you’re feeling nice and appreciate what I do, consider hitting the Ko-fi link below and donating. Do or don’t, I appreciate you anyway. Be safe. Happy new year. Tell your friends you love them.

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P.S. I wrote all my sections in a four hour sitting. I like to listen to instrumental music while I write. If you’re curious what I put on to get me through it:

• Culturemix - Geography (1993)

• Atlas - Breeze (1987)

• Oscilation Circuit - Série Réflexion 1 (1984)

• Satoshi Ashikawa - Wave Notation 2: Still Way (1982)

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Imagine you’re playing a classic video game for the first time. You’ve taken control of the hero, sword and shield in hand. Your first objective is to venture into an enigmatic forest and find the key that will grant you entry to the first dungeon. Having bested a mob of enemies, you reach a grassy alcove surrounded by trees. A rotund raccoon stands in the brush, beating on its belly like a taiko drum. You speak to it. It gives a vague response about its nose being sensitive to dust. Keenly aware that the game has given you a hint, you absorb the information and proceed. You try to exit the overgrown canopy from the north and the creature bellows at you. “You're goin’ ta be lost, thanks to me! Heh heh!” You’re swiftly warped to a different location. However, the moment has been cheapened. You’re looking down upon your hero with a bird’s eye view, and the adjacent areas are clearly visible. The Mysterious Forest isn’t that big. As it turns out, you’re really not lost at all. The developers have clearly failed at making an impactful moment here, haven’t they?

Well, not exactly. What I’ve just described is an early moment that illustrates one of the key problems with The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX HD, a fan remaster of the renowned Game Boy title from 1993 that’s been generating a lot of buzz. By all rights, it’s an incredible hack with a load of modern updates that re-frame the game in ways never before imagined. It fills the entire screen, shocking you with the impressive scale of its locale. It’s a beautiful way to tour the Koholint Island you’ve come to love over years of exploring its distant corners, but it’s not a great way to experience it for the first time. Link’s Awakening, like any other video game, was developed around the limitations of the hardware it was made for. The Game Boy’s screen was only 160 by 144 pixels, with a paltry 8 kilobytes of RAM available to play with. Naturally, this meant your window into the world of your adventure was small, and the game couldn’t “remember” much of what was happening beyond the bounds of that frame. Demolishing these load-bearing walls creates unintended problems.

The Link’s Awakening team took advantage of their hardware constraints by building the game as a series of dioramas. Each screen was carefully arranged to convey specific information to you. As you head south from your starting point of Mabe Village, the cliffs and pathways leading to the shores below cleverly communicate that you can continue going south. To the right, there’s a large expanse blocked off by rocks, but it’s careful not to give too much away; all you need to know is there’s something to see once you can clear the path. Some screens are self-contained objectives, while others are built to point you in the direction of those objectives. The encounter with the raccoon is one of those key instructive moments, fundamentally changed by DX HD.

The lesson you learn is that some screens have conditions that must be satisfied. You’ve got to find some powder to make the little guy sneeze. That much is evident. When you’re whisked away from the direction you tried to go, you’re receiving another subtle bit of guidance: there are alternate pathways to take. You can’t go there yet, but there’s something else you missed! Your mental map updates, and you make a note to come back once you’ve found what you’re meant to find. The Mysterious Forest is a dry run for the first dungeon, Tail Cave. By the time you’ve reached the first true test of your mettle, you should already be somewhat familiar with how the game expects you to engage with it.

The raccoon room also functions as an evocative set piece—a startling moment that undercuts the grounded puzzling and spelunking with a bit of fantastical dream logic. Stepping beyond the boundary of each scene is a leap of faith that shows you new areas or challenges to face. Beyond the practical reason for its inclusion, it also makes you feel something. You want to get the little rascal back, but you’re also wondering how he pulled that trick on you. What else is he capable of? What other frustrations lie in wait for you?

There’s a version of the Lost Woods in nearly every Zelda, dating back to the original from 1986. This section of the Mysterious Forest is a miniaturization of it, distilling the disorienting theme into a single moment that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Imagine if, upon your first encounter with its iconic iteration in Ocarina of Time, you could see right through the dark shrouds that obscure each path and it’s immediately clear which ones take you back to the entrance. You would be robbed of the realization that you needed to pay closer attention. By seeing beyond the bounds of the raccoon room, the moment loses tension. It’s obvious that you can simply go around. You don’t have to remember where you’ve been when the entire screen serves as a constant proximal clue. Proper dungeons suffer from this high definition treatment even more; the illusion of each area as a gauntlet of challenges is shattered, and it nearly trivializes the fact that you don’t have immediate access to a map.

No matter how you look at it, remasters are revisions of history. Something is lost when you bring a period piece in line with the standards of the modern era. You might lose the physical experience of holding the hardware in your hands, the unique visuals of an obsolete display, or the limitations that informed the game’s very design philosophy. In the case of Link's Awakening DX HD, you lose all of the above—but that’s not to say you don’t gain anything for your trouble. Koholint in widescreen is vibrant and bustling, feeling like an immersive world as parts of it spill off into your peripheral vision. The fact that the entire overworld is active is interesting. Enemies from different “screens” can interact with you and chase you down, and you can no longer reset the state of certain rooms without backtracking further or exiting an area entirely. This changes some core functions and upends decades-old design, but makes the world feel much more connected.

My recommendation to anyone that hasn’t played Link’s Awakening would be to try the original or the colorized DX version on the Game Boy Color. I don’t mean to imply that the DX HD fan project doesn’t have its place, but I don’t think it’s a replacement—nor do I believe it intends to be. It’s a lovely way to breathe new life into a world you know like the back of your hand, but you’ve got to know it to begin with. It’s fun for a replay and I’m glad it exists, but it’s best appreciated as a feat of technical prowess and an expression of devoted love for a timeless classic. To understand how history has changed, you should make an effort to live through it first. ✿

Thank you for reading this eighth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Link’s Awakening is my favorite game, so I had a lot of feelings about this project. I hope it doesn’t seem like I don’t want you to play it! I’ve just played this game more than any other video game, and my mind went wild considering what a first timer’s experience with this game might be. The more I thought about it, I realized I could illustrate a lot of my ideas by focusing on one specific scene. I had an epiphany that the raccoon room is an extremely important early moment in the game, which I may never have considered had I not played this thing. That alone made it worth the experience!

Nintendo has already acted swiftly to take this thing down, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you’re curious about playing it. Just look around. Or ask me, if you must. I don’t mind helping!

Of course, this wasn’t the post I had in mind when I promised you one for today. I just wanted to get this out while it was timely. I’ll probably save that other one for next year. I don’t want to inundate your inbox. See you again at the end of the month, yeah?

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Yousei Suzuki is a guitarist and label owner based in Osaka, Japan. He founded Senri Records to express his love for American roots music, releasing his own compositions alongside other musicians that embody the label’s ethos. On April 4th, 2022, I corresponded with Suzuki via email for an installment of Bandcamp Daily’s Tape Label Report. Senri has been on hiatus since 2019, but returned this month with a stunning new album. To celebrate the release of Suzuki’s Riverside Music, I’m publishing the full interview. I was only able to ask him four questions, but his responses were very thoughtful. I’ve also provided both the English and Japanese transcripts. (Thanks to Ryo Miyauchi for translating!) Enjoy. :->

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Shy: Could you share the story of how your label began?

Yousei Suzuki: I wanted to contribute to music somehow, so I started Senri Records. I wanted to introduce music from Japan to all over the world. I started the label during a period in time when I hurt my finger and couldn’t play any instruments. I once had an opportunity to put out a tape from this label called Scissor Tail Editions. That’s when I learned that there was this method of releasing limited runs of cassettes, and I thought it was a really fun idea. There was also Tobira Records in Japan. I also looked at Sunshine Ltd. and John Fahey of Takoma Records as a model.

You release a lot of your own music, with an influence from classic American blues guitarists. How did you develop a connection with blues guitar?

During the ‘90s, I liked alternative music. I really liked Beck in particular, and I became aware of country blues from his covers of Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, who I also covered. I was really taken back to hear him play in this tuning called open D minor that had this really distinct ring to it.

By the mid-2000s, I was uploading my own music and searching for lesser known musicians on MySpace. I found about artists like John Fahey and Robbie Basho there, and music by Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Cian Nugent, Micah Blue Smaldone, Harris Newman—all of whom were influenced by those two artists. I thought their music sounded so new even though they were legacy artists.

I started to go to Po’boy Records in Osaka in the 2010s, where they stocked a lot of American roots music. I had the chance to listen to a wide variety, from blues, folk, country, bluegrass, jazz, to mountain music. I learned a lot at Po’boy Records and met a lot of musicians there. Unfortunately, they shut down in 2021 due to COVID. A great memory I had was the owner performing John Fahey’s “In Christ There Is No East or West” for me when I went there for the first time.

The music on Senri feels distinctly Japanese, even with the strong influence of American acoustic styles. Can you talk about other influences that have shaped the music? Other styles, or even specific people or locations?

I think there’s definitely a trait in Japanese people to turn international influences into something Japanese. The trait in us as living on an island, our love of nature (and closeness with the sounds of nature), the Japanese DNA, the influence from video game music, the noise of the city, influences from music passed down throughout history, I can give a lot of theories. I get the impression of music by European or American guitarists being more structured, while music by Japanese guitarists is more abstract. There’s this music called gagaku in Japanese culture with this strange space, and maybe there are influences from that. It’s hard to give a clear answer. Maybe the closest is to say that it’s simply in our genes.

Do you have a favorite release on Senri? Is there one that feels most special or representative of the label?

For a release that feels Senri-like, it would be Matsumoto Tomohito’s First Demo. Senri Records has three themes of “acoustic, private, primitiveness,” and this one really fits them all. His first recordings were recorded straight to the cassette player, and those sounds of the acoustic guitar are very raw.

Table Music Meeting’s Kusa Ga Yureteru is also a favorite album of mine. Whenever I listen to their music, I imagine the seaside city where they live. I love the intimate atmosphere. ✿

鈴木庸聖

大阪出身ギターリスト、そしてレーベルオーナーの鈴木庸聖。ルーツミュージックへの感心から、Senri Recordsは立ち上げ、彼自身の作曲を含め、その興味を示す様々なミージャシャンの音楽をリリースしている。Senriは2019年から休止していたのだが、今月、鈴木自ら作った新しいアルバム、Riverside Musicをリリースしたのだ。その素敵なリリースを機に、私が、去年の4月にBandcamp DailyのTape Label Reportの為に取材した、鈴木とのインタビューをフルに英語版と日本語共に載せる。彼に四つしか質問を送れなかったのだが、思慮深く回答してくれた。(訳: 宮内凌)

シャイ： レーベルを始めたきっかけは何でしたか？

鈴木庸聖： 音楽に広く貢献したいと思いがあり、Senri Recordsを始めました。日本の音楽を広く世界に紹介した気持ちがありました。指を痛めて演奏できない時期があり、その時に始めました。以前、Scissor Tail Editionsというレーベルから、カセットのリリースをしてもらう機会がありました。その時、カセットでの少部数でのリリースの仕方があると知り、とても面白いと思いました。日本でもTobira Recordsなどもありました。Sunshine Ltd.やJohn FaheyのTakoma Recordsも参考にしました。

鈴木さんの楽曲からは、アメリカのブルースギタリスト達の音楽の影響を感じるんですが、ブルースギターとはどういう出会いだったんですか？どういう風に奥深くなっていったんですか？

90年代、私はオルタナティブミュージックが好きでした。特にBeckがお気に入りのミュージシャンで、彼がMississippi John Hurt、Skip Jamesの曲をカバーしていました。その時に初めてカントリーブルースを認識しました。自分でもSkip Jamesのカバーもしました。オープンDmという独特な響きがあるチューニングで弾いているのを知り大変驚きました。

2000年代の半ば頃には、MySpaceで自分の音楽をネット上にアップロードしたり、未知の音楽家を探していました。そこでJohn FaheyやRobbie Bashoを知り、彼らから影響を受けたJack Rose、James Blackshaw、Cian Nugent、Micah Blue Smaldone、Harris Newmanの音楽を知りました。彼らは伝統的でありながら、大変新しい音楽をやっていると思いました。2010年代からは大阪にあったPo’boy Recordsに通い始めました。そこでは多くのアメリカのルーツミュージックを扱っていました。ブルース、フォーク、カントリー、ブルーグラス、ジャズ、マウンテンミュージック等、幅広く聴く機会がありました。Po’boy Recordsで多くの事を学び、ミュージシャンとの出会いがありました。残念ながらこのレコード屋はコロナの影響もあり、2021年に閉店してしまいました。初めて訪れた時に店主がJohn Faheyの「In Christ There Is No East or West」を演奏してくれたのは良い思い出です。

Senriからリリースされている音楽からは、アメリカからのアコースティックスタイルの音楽から影響を受けているのに関わらず、日本っぽさがはっきり伝わります。他に、どういうものが音楽に影響しているのですか？違う音楽、場所、人物でもいいので、教えてください。

海外からの影響を日本的に変換するという、日本人の特徴は確かにあると思います。島国という国土の特徴、自然が豊か（自然の音が身近）、日本人のDNA、ゲーム音楽からの影響、都市の喧騒、伝統的な音楽からの影響、様々な仮説は挙げれます。

ヨーロッパやアメリカのギタリストの方がより構築された音楽、日本のギタリストの方がより抽象的な音楽、である印象を受けます。日本の伝統的な音楽に雅楽というものがありますが、不思議な間がある音楽です。そういう伝統的な音楽からの影響があるかもしれません。実際ははっきり答えるのが難しい問題です。もしかしたらDNAの特徴というのが一番近いのかもしれません。

Senriから出したもので、鈴木さんが一番好きなリリースはありますか？自分にとって一番特別なもの、それかSenriにとって、最も象徴的なリリースといえば、何ですか？

Senri RecordsぽいというところではMatsumoto TomohitoのFirst Demoです。Senri Recordsのテーマは「acoustic」「private」「primitiveness」の3つですが、この作品はまさに合致しています。彼の初めての録音はカセットテープのレコーダーで録音されていて、そのアコースティックギター音はとても生々しい音です。

Table Music Meetingの「草がゆれてる」も好きなアルバムです。彼らの音楽を聴くと、彼らが住む海沿いの町の風景を思い起こします。親密な空気感がとても好きです。 ✿

Thank you for reading this seventh installment of once bitten, twice shy. I’ve wanted to share this transcript for a while, and I finally have a good excuse! Yousei’s new album Riverside Music is really nice, so please give it a listen. (And have a look at his blog, where he wrote a little bit about what the album means to him.) You also have the option to buy the entire Senri catalog for less than 60 bucks, which I think is totally worth it. That’s what I did! Poke around on the Bandcamp page and you’ll find it.

I’d like to give a special shoutout to Ryo Miyauchi, my friend who helped me with translation. This interview wouldn’t have been possible without them. Give their newsletter This Side of Japan a look! It’s been an indispensable resource for keeping on top of new releases coming out of Japan. I’d be so lost without it!

I have a brand new post scheduled for Monday, so look forward to that. I’ll also be doing a sequel to the Buddy List on the same day I posted it last year. Three posts in December, wowie! Christmas came early for you. (Maybe drop a donation in the Ko-fi if you’re feeling the holiday spirit?) See ya around. 💜

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It’s rare that a video game gets a second shot at life. The three weeks after a title’s release is the critical window where most sales are made and the strongest impressions are left. After the proverbial ink dries on the pages of review sites (if you’re fortunate enough to get any) and the chatter dies down, sales gradually taper off to a slow trickle. Unless you’re Nintendo—whose games buck the trend and continue to sell year over year—your options are limited; you can release an update or tack on some DLC for a modest bump, but it only delays the inevitable. However, there’s one wild card that can occasionally bring a stagnant game back from the brink of death: social media trends.

Among Us is doubtless the most famous example; released in 2018 to little fanfare, the Mafia-style multiplayer exploded in popularity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to popular live streamers setting up games with friends. It was an organic moment in which the game’s appeal was demonstrated by regular people simply playing it and enjoying themselves, free of marketing campaigns, stilted tech demos, or money exchanging hands under the table. These days, with the increased prevalence of streaming, it’s not uncommon for games to get rolled up into the online ecosystem, extending the tail of their lifespan and keeping them in the public consciousness much longer. (This outcome is so desirable that some developers even try to court influencers with their game design choices.) Suika Game is the latest benefactor of these surprise viral trends.

The physics-based puzzler began life as a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon (合成大西瓜), spreading through word of mouth via Weibo (China’s equivalent to Twitter) in early 2021. The premise is extremely simple: fruits fall from the top of the playing field, and combining two matching ones creates a larger fruit. Your goal is to continue combining fruit until you create the largest one (the watermelon, of course) while keeping your stack low enough so that it doesn’t spill over the top. The game became massively popular in China, but avoided crossing over to other countries due to the walled garden of Chinese app stores. (Searching Synthetic Watermelon or Suika Game on Western storefronts turns up a bunch of imitators, but don’t download them; they’re all terrible.) Synthetic Watermelon would eventually leapfrog over the Sea of Japan later in the year through an unlikely avenue: a high quality clone version by the company popInAladdin, developed for their line of home projectors as little more than a demonstration of the technology. The new remix on the Chinese mobile hit was modestly popular—enough that the company thought porting it to the Nintendo Switch as Suika Game (スイカゲーム) was a good business move—but it didn’t make waves right away.

Suika Game really started to blow up in 2023, circulating around the Japanese-speaking internet and eventually catching the attention of influencers. Popular livestreamer Futon-chan (布団ちゃん) played it on September 7th, describing it as “a game I often play in my bedroom.” From there, it shot to the moon; VTubers from Nijisanji and Hololive are streaming it for insane amounts of hours, and it’s currently the top selling game on Nintendo’s online storefront in Japan as of writing.

But what makes it such a good stream game? First of all, it’s easy to comprehend; you don’t have to observe for long before you’ve gotten a grasp on the gameplay loop. The goalposts can shift the moment you accomplish a milestone you’ve set for yourself, which keeps you playing for a long time. First, your goal might simply be to make one watermelon; then, you get fixated on making two; after that, you have to beat your high score. It’s also highly competitive, so people that love to backseat are instantly engaged and eager to prove they can put up better numbers. Most importantly, there’s an element of unpredictability. Suika Game is a matching-style puzzler, sort of like a Puyo Puyo or Drop Mania, but the fact that each piece of fruit has physics that affect every other one can lead to amusing and unfortunate consequences. Often, you’ll accidentally launch a tiny cherry off into space and immediately get owned. More opportunities for the player to suffer means more entertainment for the viewer—the popularity of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy as a livestream game has proven this.

“Stream game” has become a sort of pejorative in certain circles, carrying with it the implication that it’s a better experience to watch than actually play. (These criticisms often get lobbed at things like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series or Tsugunohi—a game that a disingenuous person might describe as nothing but “walking to the left.”) Depending on your values, it might sometimes be the case that you’d rather be the observer than the person at the controls. There’s nothing wrong with that! What makes Suika Game great, though, is that it’s a good time no matter which side you’re on. I enjoy testing my fruit stacking abilities just as much as I do scrolling the game’s hashtag and observing random Twitter users succeed or fail at it. The game’s taken a hold on some of my friends, and it’s been a blast sharing scores and screenshots of my misery. To put it simply: Suika Game is a good stream game because, more generally, it’s a good social experience. It’s fun to share the moment with someone else. ✿

Thank you for reading this sixth installment of once bitten, twice shy. I missed my target of one post a week because I got sad, but I hope you can forgive me. This was not the post I planned to make, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this damn watermelon game. If you’d like to play it yourself, it can be obtained for a cool 240円 (about $1.60) on the Nintendo eShop. It’s a bit of an ordeal to set up a Japanese account, but you’re smart and can figure it out. I’ll have another post up soon, okay? Stay hydrated. Eat some fruit. Maybe donate to the Ko-fi if you’re feeling nice, because my job security is not looking so good right now lol.

I’ll see you in a few. Byeeeee. 🍉

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If you’re into retro games, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent some time thinking about the fraught state of media preservation. Maybe you’ve looked up a game you remember from your childhood on the secondhand market and lamented how prohibitively expensive your hobby has become. Maybe one of your favorite games is finally available again after the company holding the rights benevolently decided it was worthy of a remaster, and you wondered why it hasn’t been there all along. You’ve likely at least entertained the idea of downloading a few pirated ROMs. All things considered, the state of video game preservation is currently pretty good.

Organizations like the Video Game History Foundation and Gaming Alexandria work tirelessly to ensure games and supplemental materials are accessible in (mostly) legal ways that are amicable to publishers. By less law-abiding means, passionate amateur preservationists have ensured that the complete libraries of almost every mainstream gaming platform are available, with good tools for emulating them. But for every Nintendo Entertainment System with immaculate documentation, there’s another obscure platform without that community momentum behind it.

Munkiki’s Castles has been a slow work in progress, with preservation efforts beginning in 2017 at the latest. The 2002 Sokoban-style block puzzler with a simian protagonist (the titular Munkiki) was developed by IOMO exclusively for the Nokia 3410 mobile phone—a device not exactly known for its games. The 1.0 version of Munkiki was included with brand new 3410s, but wasn’t part of its stock firmware; Nokia sideloaded the software before shipping the phones out. This is important to note, because resetting the phone wiped the game from memory. Over time, this would reduce the amount of phones holding a copy that could be extracted. To make matters more difficult, the game was dependent on the Club Nokia digital distribution portal for updates. The service was a rudimentary precursor to modern app stores, operating on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)—a standard for accessing web pages over mobile networks, which was depreciated rather quickly in favor of modern HTML. The 3410 also only had 180 kilobytes of storage, meaning that if you needed to download much else from the Club Nokia servers, you eventually had to make room. Munkiki’s Castles was likely one of the first things to go.

Finding a phone with a copy of Munkiki wouldn’t turn out to be too much of a challenge, fortunately, but a problem immediately presented itself: there was no way to run it when the executable file was recovered. The game’s 3D graphics, which were the first of its kind in a mobile game, were only able to be rendered due to a custom API embedded in the 3410, which supplemented the extremely limited early version of Java ME the program ran in. No progress would be made until the following year, when an update to the FreeJ2ME emulator allowed the game to boot. The emulator’s detailed error reporting pointed to the missing files the game attempted to refer to, allowing the proprietary software to be reverse engineered. Once the game was running properly in emulation, another issue became apparent: version 1.0 was bugged and the game couldn’t be beaten. It wasn’t until mid 2023, when the 1.03 and 1.06 revisions were extracted, that Munkiki’s Castles could be played to completion on anything other than the aging Nokia handset.

For all the effort it took to rescue the game, there’s a difficult truth that must be acknowledged: if more people actually cared about it, the work would have been done much faster. A handful of people obsessed over it in the time they could spare from their busy lives, but Munkiki’s Castles is the sort of title destined only to draw the attention of enthusiasts. It’s the first mobile game with 3D graphics, one of the first games ever released for the Java ME platform, and both of those things are true because of the impressive ingenuity of early mobile software developers—but is the game actually good?

Well. It’s pretty neat, but its relatively simple concept of block pushing with light platforming probably wasn’t impressing anyone in 2002. To put things into perspective: its contemporaries were The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Most people that played it likely thought it was fun for what it was, but put it out of their memory before throwing their old phone into the garbage. It might live on as a vague recollection to a former 3410 owner; they may not even be sure it actually existed.

The double-edged sword with media preservation is that we’re constantly walking a tightrope. Anything you recall can be forgotten just as swiftly. How many times have you found something you misplaced, only to lose it again? The moment something moves out of our collective eyesight, it might as well not be there anymore. Media preservation only works as a community effort because more sets of eyes are trained on the treasures we seek to protect. Seeing how easy it was to collectively forget Munkiki’s Castles, you should feel even more motivated to remember. Throw the emulator into your documents folder and tuck it away safely, the same way you might hang your keys up by the door. ✿

Thank you for reading this fifth installment of once bitten, twice shy. It’s been around four months since I last published something here, and I thought it was about time I got back to it. I’ve been trying to write short reviews of video games here and there to get myself back into the swing of things, but I always end up having more to say than I thought. I suppose that’s not a bad problem to have. These pieces have been helpful catalysts for developing broader thoughts and opining on ideas I’ve been nursing for a while, so I’d like to share them with you, dear reader. I think I’ll post one a week to make up for make up for having you wait so long. Sound good?

See you later.

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Sources:

• Munkiki’s Castles on Lost Media Wiki, which has a fairly detailed account of the preservation timeline.

• Reddit post recounting recompileorg’s process of reverse engineering the proprietary API.

• Tweet by Vanessa Summers announcing the preservation of versions 1.03 and 1.06 of the game. Has some interesting stuff in the replies.

• Write-up by Glenn Broadway detailing his time working in the games industry, including a little bit about IOMO. He mentions a lot more of these Nokia games that have yet to be preserved.

• A lengthy playthrough of the game running in an emulator. Additionally, here it is running on a Nokia 3410. You can hear the difference between the raw audio and what it sounds like through the phone speaker by comparing these. Very interesting!

This piece was originally written for Lost in Cult’s Lock-On gaming journal, issue 003 of their print magazine. In light of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s recent passing, I’m sharing it here on my newsletter. I lived inside the universe of L.O.L. Lack of Love for a while, immersing myself in the game and poring over interviews so that I might understand the ways this work uniquely represents a meeting of two singular minds. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kenichi Nichi met at a critical juncture, while both their creative lives were in a state of flux. Here’s the story of that fruitful friendship.

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The creation of video games is often an intensive labor of love. Most people involved in their development, no matter how small the role they play, are usually eager to get into the details of their personal contribution—though that wasn’t always the case for Kenichi Nishi. Some of the most highly regarded and formative games in the genre of role-playing—namely, Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger—feature Nishi’s name as some of his earliest credits, but he’s not too keen on boasting about his time at Square. Asked about his role as a map planner on the titles in a 2006 interview with Cubed3, Nishi was quick to downplay his involvement. “I was rather a lazy employee who often did not show up to the office among the big team that consists of more than 100 people,” he said, continuing, “I think it is more appropriate for me to say I was more like pretending to be involved in the development.” He finishes with a laugh, but his answer speaks a solemn truth: he hadn’t yet found his place in the industry.

The tide would begin to turn for Nishi when he defected from Square in 1995 with aspirations to start his own studio. Inviting some of his closest friends that he made while at the company, the newly minted venture would be known as Love-de-Lic—a reference to one of Nishi’s favourite albums, the fifth release by electronic music pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, Technodelic. The working environment at Love-de-Lic, which had thirteen employees at its peak, was significantly different. Yoshiro Kimura—who contributed map and combat design to Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 while at Square—recalls it being a strange place to work, though that strangeness would elevate the collective creativity. “It was like a band playing an ad-lib session, with ideas flowing freely from every direction,” Kimura told Vice in 2020. “There was no ‘band leader’—we each respected one another, and we could express ourselves individually.”

To say that Love-de-Lic’s freewheeling atmosphere would leave a lasting impression on its staff is an understatement. In an interview for The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book sometime in the mid-2010s—long after the studio’s dissolution in 2000—Kimura was still able to sketch the office floor plan from memory. He recalled playing GoldenEye 007 and StarFox 64 in a communal recreation room with coworkers, eating dinner made by the company’s manager with everyone almost daily, and even the positions of each employee’s desk, which were pushed closely together to encourage conversation while working. “Like we’re a big family,” he said.

Love-de-Lic’s environment of creative freedom would be immediately apparent from their first project, the self-described ‘anti-RPG’ called moon, released in 1997 for the PlayStation. Drawing from the team’s collective experience working on role-playing games with Square, they aimed to create a subversive take on the genre that was informed by a love for what brought them together and a desire to see it from a new perspective. Moon puts the player in the role of a ‘supporting’ character in a typical RPG, allowing you to bear secondhand witness to the deeds of the archetypal ‘hero’—a nakedly apparent reference to the protagonist of Dragon Quest. The hero slays innocent creatures for experience, barges into houses, and causes disruption to the lives of the townsfolk, leaving the player to deal with the aftermath. By observing the NPCs and helping them with their everyday lives, as well as bringing peace to the souls of monsters felled by the hero, you gain love instead of levels (a concept that inspired Toby Fox to explore similar themes in Undertale).

It’s crucially important to note that moon was not meant to be a criticism of RPGs, but a loving send-up; Nishi’s favorite game, at the time, was 1988’s Dragon Quest III. Love-de-Lic’s status as a group of people in comparatively minor, but nevertheless important, roles creating games that would crystallize the design language of a genre for years to come made them perhaps the most qualified to turn it on its head. They had firsthand experience, but were still on the fringes, appreciative of where they’d come from but unbound by fealty to convention. Though Nishi would describe his next project with Love-de-Lic as an RPG, it would be even more decoupled from any recognizable tradition. For L.O.L.: Lack of Love, the studio’s swan song released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast, Nishi followed his heart.

To hear Nishi tell it, Lack of Love began with a chance encounter with one of his creative muses—none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto, keyboardist of Yellow Magic Orchestra. A mutual friend of the musician and the game developer told Nishi that Sakamoto would be coming to the legendary Club Eden, and that they could be introduced. Nishi dropped everything on his docket to make the meeting happen. Nishi and Sakamoto hit it off instantly, discussing shared interests in video games, film, music, and computers. They exchanged email addresses to keep in contact, and while writing back and forth discovered another significant point of overlap: a deep concern for the planet’s environment.

Sakamoto’s life had been tracking along a parallel path to Nishi, striking out in his own creative direction after parting ways with Yellow Magic Orchestra. From an origin point of arcade game influenced techno with the band that brought him fame, he dabbled in classical piano, experimental electronics, and scores for film. By the time the two creatives met, Sakamoto had surrendered himself to the melancholy of Baroque-style chamber music, a reflection of his worsening view of the state of the planet. “The sadness comes from my concern about life,” he explained in 2019 to 52 Insights. “I knew that the world would become disastrous with environmental problems. I decided to speak out about that in the late ‘90s and a lot of fans thought I was mad.” Sakamoto famously said, after a visit to the nuclear disaster site at Fukushima, that “a tsunami acts almost as a state of restoration, trying to get back to its original state.” His belief was that the Earth would reach a state of equilibrium, if allowed to play out its natural course.

Nishi did not think Sakamoto was mad. The topic of environmental scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis—which posits that the Earth possesses a natural ability to self-regulate—came up in the email discussions, and Sakamoto floated the idea of making a game about it. Nishi couldn’t possibly turn down the opportunity to work with one of his greatest influences on a subject so close to his heart; he had the concept for his next project. Development began in earnest in 1998, with Nishi and Sakamoto brainstorming ideas through regular correspondence. The game’s title was a suggestion from Sakamoto, alluding to the dangers of environmental negligence. “We wanted to question the way in which our lifestyle lacks love,” Nishi told Retro magazine in 2010.

Like moon, Lack of Love plays with your expectations from the outset, introducing you to the Lack of Love Project, a program devised by humans seeking to find other planets so that they can terraform and populate them. A robot called Halumi is dispatched to the planet where the game’s setting takes place to carry out this task, and at first it seems like the cute little automaton might be the protagonist. As Halumi unleashes a torrent of machines from his spacecraft to get to work on the planet, control is given to the player and you discover that you’ll be playing the role of a microscopic organism trying to find a way to survive on this planet now under foreign duress.

As you progress through the game, the creature grows and evolves in unexpected ways, and as it becomes more capable, it gains the ability to assist other creatures. (One stage of evolution is a black and white puppy-like form—a reference to Nishi’s dog Tao, whom he finds a way to slip into all of his games.) The game contains no dialogue or text, leaving only audio and visual cues to determine how best to elevate one another against a common threat. It acts as a potent metaphor for the fight against ecological harm, where the solutions aren’t easy and there is a need to reconcile differences in everyone’s needs—human or not—for the good of all the planet’s inhabitants. Sakamoto’s soundtrack, used sparingly to punctuate the most emotional moments in Nishi’s writing, channels the aching sadness of their environmental angst to underscore feelings of loneliness and a longing for togetherness.

Each game in Love-de-Lic’s repertoire exposes the bleeding hearts of the human beings that created them, and expresses a deep affection for something or someone. In the case of Lack of Love, it shows that one can gain fulfillment from finding common ground with others in ways you never considered. Working toward a future you’ve never known—whether that’s environmental prosperity or anything else your heart yearns for—starts to make sense because, through forging connections, you’ve finally learned it’s possible. Or, to put it another way: if it hurts, that means it can heal. ✿

Thank you for reading the fourth installment of once bitten, twice shy. I wrote this piece before many were expecting the untimely passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but I put a lot of heart into it and I remain proud of what I’ve written. Sakamoto, along with his friends and collaborators in and around Yellow Magic Orchestra, are responsible for nurturing my curiosity for almost everything I love. They each spread out into wildly unique paths, touching every form of art with unrestrained creativity and zero care for convention. I hope to evolve into a similar fearlessness.

In the meantime, while I gestate in my chrysalis, I will simply pay forward my gratitude. Rest in peace to both Ryuichi Sakamoto and the late Yukihiro Takahashi. I lay a thousand flowers at your feet.

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Todd Luke is a video game developer, musician, and multimedia artist from southern California. He started making games in 2011. In 2014, he started work on an adventure game called 24 Killers, expanding the concept from a flash game of the same name he created the year before. Development was originally funded via Kickstarter. The game is now available on Steam. I talked to Todd on March 11th, 2023 on Zoom to discuss his development process, influences, and more.

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Shy Clara Thompson: First off, congrats on the launch!

Todd Luke: Thank you!

How has that experience been? More busy than you expected? Fielding bug reports and stuff like that.

It was a lot quieter than I expected. The first part, maybe the first half of the launch day, I was just kind of sitting and watching the Discord and the Steam communities and there was nothing coming in about bugs. I was kind of shocked by that.

Were you expecting a lot?

Oh yeah, especially with an increased volume of players. I was expecting a lot more.

So it’s been pretty chill, then?

Yeah. As people have played more of the game, there have been reports coming in, but nothing super major. I guess my fear was that everybody would start playing on launch day and just get a black screen and not be able to play the game at all, but luckily that wasn’t the case.

You’ve been working on this game for a long time. The Kickstarter was put up in 2014, right?

Yeah.

And even before that, you had the flash game. I’m curious how your philosophy of designing the game changed over this period of time, because it looks really different from the old mockups. Has your goal of what you wanted to accomplish changed?

I wanted to expand on the flash game and make it a bigger town. It was sort of like a whodunnit murder mystery. Then, as I started making it, it turned into this adventure game where there’s different things to do around the town and different characters to talk to. It kept growing, and I think the biggest change, for me, is when a friend introduced me to Love-de-lic—the creators of Chulip and moon: Remix RPG Adventure. After seeing those games I’m like “these are the kinds of games I’ve always wanted to make,” and maybe I didn’t even know it. That changed my design philosophy a lot.

The other thing was that I switched from pixel art to rendered 3D graphics. That was kind of out of necessity because I wasn’t really happy with the pixel art, and it was hard for me to do a large volume of it and be consistent. With the 3D I found it was easier for me to produce a lot more art.

So more that it was easier to get your ideas out than a conscious stylistic change?

Probably a little bit of both. I do love the old pre-rendered look of PS1 games and earlier stuff on the Super Nintendo or Genesis.

Is there a particular visual influence you had in mind? I’m sure the main callback is moon, but are there others?

Also Digimon World for the PS1.

Oh, that’s so cool! I love that game.

The background art in that game is just amazing. And of course, Final Fantasy VII had beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds.

How deep in development were you when you got introduced to Love-de-lic and changed your direction?

I thought I was pretty deep (laughs), but then the game just kept growing. I thought “okay, this game’s pretty much done and I’m happy with it.” I felt like it was pretty constrained, but after I got introduced to Love-de-lic my idea about what I wanted to make started expanding. I’d have to look back, but it was probably a year or two after the Kickstarter.

Has all of the time since then been, I guess, recalibrating? Because you realized that you made a game that wasn’t exactly the one you wanted to make. So you basically had to start over and make a new game?

That’s what it felt like. It’s pretty much an entirely new game from what was on Kickstarter.

Do you like the comparisons to Love-de-lic? Do you invite that sort of thing, or would you rather people examine 24 Killers on its own terms?

I’m flattered that people would compare it to those games. [Yoshiro] Kimura is amazing. I love watching the “indie game uncle” videos he puts up on YouTube. What’s neat is that a lot of people have been saying “this is clearly inspired by Love-de-lic and Onion Games, but stands up on its own.”

I love Kimura’s videos too! Do you feel like you’ve learned anything about game design from them? Have you internalized anything?

I think so. In general, his whole attitude is very humble. He’s curious about things and the way he looks at the world is really cool. It seems like he does a lot of traveling around the world—which I haven’t really done—but I just like his curiosity. His games are influenced a lot by his life experience.

Like, for me, a lot of the dialogue in 24 Killers is influenced by people I’ve met in jobs I’ve had over the years—customers, coworkers, conversations I’ve had where I’m like “what?” Weird conversations, you know, that would stick with me and I’d go right home at the end of the day.

You were working at a gas station, right?

Yeah, I worked at a gas station from 2015 to the end of 2021—so close to seven years.

And you got all kinds of weird people coming in?

Oh yeah, all the time.

Is there a specific interaction that directly correlates to something you put into the game?

So Gunther, the parakeet in the game, he’s kind of like a cowboy. At one point he says “cash on the barrelhead.” That was directly from this really gruff cowboy guy that came into the store and came up to me to pay for his stuff, and that’s what he said to me. “Cash on the barrelhead!” (laughs). That just stuck with me and I thought “I gotta put that in the game somewhere.”

There are a lot of silly little lines in the game that make me curious how you came up with them. I’ve tried writing game dialogue myself, and it’s hard to strike that balance between something natural and something fun and unusual. The best shortcut to that, I think, is to draw from life experience. So it’s really cool that yours has been useful.

Right!

Do you consider yourself much of a writer?

I don’t think so. Really, a lot of the dialogue in the game—I had a text file on my computer just called “24K writing ideas” and if I had an idea or a weird interaction or a weird thought or something funny or anything I felt would be interesting for a character to say, I just popped it into there. If I was writing a character, then I would draw on that and form a personality around one of those little phrases or ideas.

Do you feel like next time you make a game, writing it would be easier now that you have a process. Does it get any easier?

I don’t think so! There were times that it was so tough to sit down and write things, and it’s just gotta be done, you know? I really don’t enjoy that part of it, but that’s how I approached it.

Is that the part you enjoy doing the least?

In terms of actually making the game, probably. I guess when I got into it I would start enjoying it, but to actually start—to sit down and get into that mode of writing—it was really difficult for me.

The other thing I really don’t enjoy is marketing stuff. That is just tough.

I totally understand why somebody would rather have somebody else do it for them. As a writer, sometimes I have to sell myself, and I hate doing it! I just wanna put it out there and hope the people that need it find it (laughs). With a game, there’s that financial aspect that requires you to stay on top of it.

Yeah. With Steam, they made it pretty easy with the Curator Connect system where you can search curators and add them to a list and send your game to them through that. That made it somewhat easier. I also had a good friend helping me with marketing, and giving me advice from the sidelines about stuff. I have no clue when it comes to that kind of thing.

For me, the way I heard about 24 Killers was through the Love-de-lic Lounge Discord server. I noticed you’re in there! They’ve been excited for it for quite a while, so I was sort of passively aware of the game. I’m curious how being part of these communities might have influenced your approach to making the game or marketing the game.

It’s been cool seeing all these communities interested in these types of games. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have even known there was a market for it. I wish I was a little more involved in them; I lurk most of the time in Discord servers and forums. I was kind of thinking about how increased interest in Love-de-lic has opened the door to release games like this. I think a lot of people are enjoying these types of games now that wouldn’t have in the past, and they gave them a shot, maybe, after trying moon or other stuff from Onion Games like Dandy Dungeon.

It blows me away constantly how—I don’t know if you follow romhacking or fan translation scenes—but there’s really cool stuff happening almost every day. It feels like more people are into obscure games than there used to be years ago. In the communities I’m in, we were excited for 24 Killers. There’s definitely an appetite for this stuff.

Do you think COVID had anything to do with that? People being at home and digging more into online communities?

Yes, absolutely! People had more time to spend in communities, a lot of people spent that time learning new languages and programming. I think it’s definitely a factor. I spent a lot of my COVID time studying Japanese so I could enjoy this stuff more.

Right on!

So you did pretty much all the work on 24 Killers yourself. Is it hard to find the time to develop all these skills and keep them sharp?

Yeah. You might go months in programming mode without touching Blender, and then you have to go back to that and have a refresher. That was probably the hardest thing. More infrequently, releasing trailers and doing video editing was really hard to get back into. Or web design stuff for sites, there’s just so much stuff to switch back to. I would need a refresher almost every time.

Did you ever wanna ask someone else for help?

I have asked people for help and tried to bring people on board, but it never really worked out. I always felt kind of guilty, too—I don’t have any resources to pay people for their help. I didn’t want to have somebody come and do a ton of art or programming or music and not be able to compensate them for their time.

That’s rough. I have to imagine the Kickstarter margins were very slim, especially with how long the development time has been.

Yeah.

So it was just a financial thing, choosing to do everything solo?

Yeah, it was mostly financial. I released the beta of the game almost exactly a year ago. I was looking at the changelog and I released the changelog when I started the beta and it was like March 12th or something like that, and that’s the first time I had people try the game. That's been the most collaborative experience I’ve had—working on this, getting feedback from people, that’s been awesome. It made me think that I don’t wanna do this again without a team.

Did you get a lot of creative feedback, or mostly just bug reporting? Do you ask for advice on the story or art direction?

It was everything; pacing, bug fixes, things that were unclear about the story. The amount the game has changed in the past year was huge because of the help that I’ve had.

One of my favorite things about the game, personally, is the music. How long have you been making music?

I think I picked up guitar when I was 14. I started doing home recording on the computer and found FruityLoops, or FL Studio, and started making pop music and electronic music with it. I started making a lot of music when I started making games in 2011. Games are mostly what I make music for.

What are your main influences?

My favorite band of all time is Prefab Sprout.

Oh, heck yes!

You know who they are? Awesome! As far as guitar and lyrics, they’re my biggest influence. I listen to video game music a lot. I’ve been listening to a lot of Dreamcast soundtracks lately. I’ve been listening to the Shenmue soundtracks. I like Natalie Merchant. She’s from the ‘90s, but she still plays shows and records. I like a lot of classic ‘80s stuff too.

I see on your website that you make little resin figures. When did you get into doing that?

I started getting into this YouTube channel called CraftsMan. Have you heard of that one?

No, I haven’t!

It’s cool. I was watching him make little figures and thought “man, I gotta try that.” I just followed what he was doing and started messing around with little Shabby heads for the Happy Shabby Games logo as practice. I made a figure of Oyaji—I made a bunch of those and hand painted them. I started making the Whisper charms too. Resin stuff’s fun!

I love the Sleepy Puppy. It’s so cute. So did you know that Yoshiro Kimura does little hand-painted clay figures?

I did not know what.

Yeah, there’s a really cool interview—it’s up on YouTube somewhere—and he’s explaining this board game he made with little potato figures. Your resin art reminded me a lot of them, so it’s cool that there’s this other little parallel you have!

When I was a kid I made this game, it was called Drop Cards, and my dad still has them at his house somewhere. You had this little arena—like a cardboard box—and there was this papier-mâché egg with little feet so it could stand up. And what you would do was blow up a balloon and put it inside of this egg, then you get these little cards, and each card would have a little sharp pointy object on them. You would take turns, each player would draw cards, and then you would use your card and drop them onto your opponent’s egg and try to pop their balloon.

Wow. And how old were you when you made this?

I was super young, maybe in middle school.

What do you think of Drop Cards now? Are you still proud of that?

(laughter) Yeah, I mean, I think my dad is the only person who ever played it with me. I wasn’t asking my friends to come over and play it or anything.

So were you really into board games?

We didn’t play a whole lot of board games. I think I just like being creative and making stuff. I was really into Pokémon cards back then, too. I thought making my own trading card game would be fun.

Getting back to 24 Killers. Playing the game, I thought it was interesting how it’s clearly got the moon and Chulip inspiration, but the difficulty is a lot more manageable. There’s just the right amount of cryptic puzzle solving that doesn’t make things too obvious, but it doesn’t leave you stumped for a super long time. Was the difficulty of those games on your mind at all?

I found Chulip very difficult, and a lot of times I had no idea what to do. The sniper that you encounter—I had to look up a guide for that. There is just no way I would have figured out how to get near it.

Yeah, me too. The guide stayed open while I played Chulip.

Yeah (laughs). I didn’t necessarily want people to have to do that. I’m enjoying seeing people talk with each other and ask questions about what to do next. That’s been kind of a battle. There’s a balance of something being too difficult, like Chulip, or too easy. For a long time, I’ve wanted to put some kind of item in the game that points players to what their next objective is, but at the same time trying to maybe insert a cutscene that gives players a hint instead of... like in modern game design where you always have that pointer to the next objective.

I think the use of Mole giving you hints and the letters that tell you what you need to do—where you still need to remember and internalize what they say—that’s a good balance. It reminds me of Link’s Awakening. Have you played it?

Very little. I’ve only played the older games on an emulator.

I think it’s cool the way it only vaguely gestures what you need to do. The information is there, but it’s up to you how to parse it out. I feel a little bit of that in 24 Killers.

Are there times in Link’s Awakening where you maybe only hear something once that you need to progress?

Yes, absolutely.

I was curious about that, because there’s some stuff like that in 24 Killers where if you skip through a dialogue you might have a hard time remembering what’s next.

If there’s something I feel like I might forget, I actually write it down. I keep a little journal when I’m playing through games. It’s fun to go back and see what your thought process was. You see what you thought was important at the time. Sometimes you might have been right, sometimes it’s not so important. It’s fun not being sure! 24 Killers has the right amount of that mystery, I think.

One thing we added recently. Wait, how far are you in the game?

Maybe about halfway, based on how much time some people have said it took them.

I don’t wanna spoil anything, but there’s a point in the game a lot of people get stuck at, and I’ve added so many things to help people try to get over that hump. It’s been a constant battle. I added a cutscene, I think yesterday or the night before, just to give one more little push for players to make it over that without taking all of the mystery out of it.

Did you run into that much in beta testing?

There were some things that were so specific, like not getting a cutscene unless you land something at a perfect angle. Really ridiculous stuff that at the time I’m like “man, this is awesome.” The reality of having other people play it that aren’t making the game is very different.

Right. You have the hindsight. Does it bother you having to compromise on those ideas that you thought were really cool?

I think it’s pretty fun. It’s kind of a challenge. My friend Mike, who’s helping with marketing, gave me advice on receiving feedback. A lot of times when people give feedback they’ll let you know their idea of how to fix the thing. He told me “you don’t have to listen to their suggestion, but listen to why they’re suggesting it.” You want to make a change that’s in line with your vision but still addresses the root of the problem. I think it’s fun to figure stuff out like that.

And there are things that people suggest that are just straight-up good ideas, and I’ve used some of those!

I’m curious how you came up with the Foam dimensions with the different effects on save files. I don’t know if I’ve seen anything like that in another game.

I listen to a lot of science and futurism podcasts on YouTube—things like Isaac Arthur or John Michael Godier or even PBS Space Time. A lot of the time what they’re talking about is so over my head, but I just enjoy listening to it. They talk a lot about the multiverse and different realities, and that influenced the 24 Killers story a lot, and also the save file system.

The idea of a Foam or bubble universe came from seeing images in these podcasts of universes in bubbles. To me, they looked like foam. That’s where I got the name for The Foam.

How do you feel like the save effects affect how people approach the game? Some of them make the game easier, but some can also make the game more challenging.

The Cursed Blessing limits your in-game days to 24, and it deletes your save file if you don’t complete it in that time.

That’s intense!

The system was put in to provide an easy way to give the game replayability. I’d also love to see people speedrun the game. I think it would be really neat to see different categories based on what kinds of Blessings are used. Like, Cursed Blessing with Fast Forward and Claw, stuff like that.

I saw that somebody found a sequence break day one.

Gosh. Many people found that and were kind of confused and thought it was the intended route. I was happy it didn’t break their game more or halt their progress. It was confusing a lot of people, because I kind of hinted at there being a place in the game that a lot of people were getting stuck, and because of that sequence break it was compounding the issue—they maybe weren’t getting some dialogue they would have gotten or playing some necessary things for progressing the story.

You ended up having to take it out, right?

I did, yeah. Hopefully. We’ll see.

It’s interesting to see a developer’s perspective with regards to speedruns. Sometimes people like to leave bugs in because they’re cool, and other times you have to do something because it might be impacting too many of the casual players.

I would have liked to keep it in if it was maybe more obscure and not so many people were finding it.

Did you play many other games for research? Either for inspiration, or to see how other games deal with problems you were encountering?

I did. My style of playing games is that I finish very few. Most of them are too long for me, so I like to skim games for a few hours and get a feel for them until I’m satisfied and get the idea. Very recently I played Eastward, a longer adventure game kind of similar to 24 Killers. I played a lot of stuff on emulators, too. I think as far as playing games for inspiration, I’ll play a few hours and absorb it—maybe not specifically playing for “research,” but that’s how I’ve been influenced by games.

I think that’s a good approach. It’s alright to play games just enough that you understand what it’s going for. In that way, it’s really fun because the first few hours are where you get the bulk of a game’s presentation and see how they pace out their key ideas. It’s fun to start games, but not always fun to finish them.

Yeah (laughs). There are games like Final Fantasy Tactics, where I’ve restarted it so many times. The last time I played it, I really got into it and finally got past that surface level enjoyment of it and got really absorbed in the systems.

That’s a good feeling, when it finally clicks!

Yeah!

How do you feel about the way you developed the endgame of 24 Killers? You don’t have to get into specifics since I’m not there yet, but did it feel satisfying the way you wrapped it up?

That’s a tough question. I think the end of a game—in my case, it maybe didn’t get as much love as the beginning of the game. I think you meet more interesting characters at the end of the game, like Martin or Gunther, and I think the Blessings kind of pull it all together. The game ends a little abruptly. It felt a little overwhelming, like, how do I end an experience? It’s kind of daunting. In a lot of games, it’s this big climax, but 24 Killers is kind of quiet. I think there is definitely closure, but not a giant fanfare. I think it’s consistent with the theme of the game, where you’re participating in this giant project of expanding the Foam. It’s like, okay, you finished a save file; here’s a Blessing and now you help to fill out the Foam even more.

I’m definitely satisfied with how it turned out. I think what I’m feeling is pressure, comparing myself to other big adventure games. Feeling the need to have that in my own game, you know? Not that the end of the game isn’t special to me or that I didn’t put my heart into it, but comparing my game to other games, I think “did I do enough?”

So far, I haven’t heard anyone saying that they think the game falls off at the end, so that’s been encouraging!

What’s one thing that you love most about the game?

I like wandering around the island, and the spaces of the game. One thing that was inspiring to me about each map is that in town, between the downtown areas are these little alleyways. They’re open to the public. You can just walk down these alleyways and people have their little gardens, and it’s just kind of a neat space to walk through. It reminds me of that enjoyable feeling of wandering around in Chulip.

I think that’s probably my favorite part of the game. ✿

Thanks for reading the third installment of once bitten, twice shy. It was an absolute blast to chat with Todd about what is likely to be my favorite game of the year. Please give 24 Killers a look!

I plan to talk to plenty more people doing things that are interesting to me. If you’re on board, consider subscribing to the newsletter. It’s free, and always will be! However, if you wanna support me, donating via Ko-fi is an option. Just hit the button below. (There’s even an option to set up a recurring monthly donation, if you really love me!) Whether you do or don’t, you have my thanks for checking in.

Be safe. Love you, buddy. 💜

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Now more than ever, I find myself appreciative of the endless breadth of expression that can manifest in the totality of art. In the past, when I felt flattened by the weight of a world that only seems to get heavier—my spirit eroded under the onslaught of a raging wind that, in the moment, feels like it might never let up—my solution was to simply give up. I’d do nothing. I wouldn’t reach out to friends and attempt to stave off loneliness. I wouldn’t put on music to fill the vacuum of silence in my empty skull. I’d just seal my eyelids shut for as long as I could manage, trying my best not to let an errant beam of light convert into an electrical impulse. My lack of ability to form any kind of human connection in extreme emotional states, whether directly or through art, was alarming. I didn’t want to feel less like myself in the moments when my grasp on identity felt weakest—and so, I sought to level up my grip.

The risk of falling into a state of emotional comatose was high in the month of January. On the morning of the 13th, I received word of my dear friend Nicky passing away. While oscillating wildly through the various stages of grief throughout the day like my Kübler-Ross playlist had been put on shuffle, I was buffeted with additional news that my nephew and niece (ages 2 and 3, respectively) had also lost their lives. I shattered into a hundred thousand pieces. Without the support of some treasured companions who knew how devastating the loss of my fallen friend was—not only for us, but for the world—I may not have found the resolve to gather up those jagged fragments and start fitting them back together. The critical difference this time, I’m guessing, is that I couldn’t easily convince myself that nobody understood how I felt.

Remembering my friend’s passion for celebrating their favorite things prevented me from falling into another quiet repose. I spent the following week absorbing the words they left behind, desperately clutching the leftover warmth from a soul that burned hot so that mine wouldn’t go cold. Nicky loved manga, so I thought about manga. I flipped through the pages of things they loved; I revisited the things I wish I could have shared with them; and I took the plunge on things we were supposed to experience together.

In this exercise of silent remembrance, I made a useful discovery for myself: in the state I was in, manga was a good way to nurse myself back to health. Days felt longer and lonelier, but I felt more able to adapt to the dulled edge of my weather-beaten emotions by immersing myself in an art form that let me take it at a slower pace. The spaces between panels provided a comfortable place to camp when I felt at capacity. I often fell asleep with a book or tablet in hand, picking up where I left off when it felt safe to open my eyes again. Shorter stories affected me most strongly; I appreciated the ability to sip on a fully realized vision in short bursts, in the moments I was best primed to receive them. So here are five one-shots that reminded me how to access the depths of my own feelings.

I’m dealing with very short stories here, so it’s impossible to write about them without some degree of spoilers. If that bothers you, I encourage you to read them first! They all come with my highest recommendation.

Makimodoshi (Akino Kondoh, 2012)

It’s interesting to think about how personalized one’s relationships to physical space can be. Depending on where you were born and the type of architecture you’re most accustomed to seeing, you could be more or less responsive to certain optical stimuli. For example: one study has shown that people from India are more susceptible to the vertical-horizontal illusion, while a contrasting group from England were more likely to be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion.1 To narrow the scope further, another study showed that the indigenous Khoisan people of rural South Africa showed far less sensitivity to the Ames window illusion than those from more urban areas of the country.2 It would naturally stand to reason, then, that you could get more granular and still find significant variation—even on an individual level.

Akino Kondoh’s Makimodoshi (transl. “rewind”) gets me thinking about these individualized micro-spatial adaptations with its unorthodox flipped paneling. The protagonist examines two simultaneous lines of thought, trying to remember whether she went right or left while chasing down two identical looking people to return a mitten dropped on a train. Evaluating her thought experiment, she ponders the implications of a world that has abruptly flipped. All of a sudden, everything looks familiar but feels wrong; you have to be mindful of bonking your elbow against the wall while brushing your teeth, stretching your arm to your opposite side to scan your train pass, and which direction you need to twist a doorknob. The unsettling feeling of being in an unfamiliar situation is rarely so dramatic, but maybe it’s worth considering your biases and challenging them a little bit.

A Trip to Tynemouth (Hayao Miyazaki, 2006)

For someone with the stature of celebrated Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, it can be difficult to imagine any opportunity being out of his reach. From his humble beginnings at Toei Animation in the early ‘60s, he’s done it all. He’s been able to bring some of his favorite stories to the big screen, building a grassroots venture between passionate friends into a media empire known to the entire world. But Miyazaki’s got unfulfilled dreams just like anyone else—heroes he wishes he could have met and places he wishes he could have gone. A Trip to Tynemouth shows a rare side of the old fogey, letting the whispers of his own heart grow a little bit louder.

Published in a Japanese edition of British author Robert Westall’s anthology of short stories, the manga is a partially autobiographical dramatization of Miyazaki’s relationship to Blackham’s Wimpy—a tale of rival Royal Air Force crews manning Vickers Wellington bomber planes. Perhaps because of the unusual nature of the comic as a companion piece to the short story, Miyazaki gets personal. He details his pilgrimage to the coastal town of Tynemouth in North East England where the story takes place, writes of his lifelong love of aviation with childlike excitement, and even fictionalizes a meeting with Westall himself. In typical Miyazaki fashion, he doesn’t allow the work to be too much about himself. He self-inserts as a cartoonish little pig, and takes long detours to describe the inner workings of aircrafts and scenes of war, but the imagined conversation with Westall reads loud and clear as his own internal dialogue—a conduit to explain the similarities he saw in the author despite being from countries that opposed each other in wartime. After all, who hasn’t done a mental rehearsal of what you’d say to your hero if you could meet them?

Pulp Girl (Youichi Abe, 2016)

I have no notes. It’s sick, it’s eight pages, there’s no dialogue. Just read it lol

Chirpy (Yoshiharu Tsuge, 1966)

I’ve been completely enraptured by the oeuvre of Yoshiharu Tsuge lately. The legendary manga artist, who got his start writing stories for kashi-hon rental comics in the 1950s, spent his entire career evaluating his relationship with storytelling. He honed his skills by borrowing heavily from his influences—even going as far, in one instance, to copy the composition of an entire page from Osamu Tezuka—but by the time he retired from manga was unshackled from established convention. His final efforts before putting down the pen in 1987 were works of warped surrealism and nakedly autobiographical confessionals that resembled little of what preceded them in manga’s then-young history.

But Tsuge’s transformation didn’t come from nowhere; he had like-minded contemporaries that pushed each other to evolve in the pages of Garo magazine, where its artists were given room to sharpen their craft with almost complete freedom from editorial oversight. Tsuge’s early stories in Garo, collected in the English language anthology The Swamp, track his stark shift in philosophy. His first, The Phony Warrior and Watermelon Sake, are Edo period tales of samurai that pick straight up from his kashi-hon days, but by the following year he was casting shades of the Tsuge that would change the landscape of alternative manga.

Chirpy is straightforward in its presentation, but unusual in its execution. It centers around a bar hostess and manga artist (a stand-in for Tsuge) down on their luck in modern Japan who decide to adopt a pet bird as a distraction from their financial woes. It manages to work as a temporary fix, but things fall apart when their avian friend unexpectedly meets its end. The story ends on a purposefully ambiguous and unsatisfying note, and was famously poorly received when it was published—perhaps because the manga-reading public wasn’t yet ready to confront that sort of discomfort with no help from the author. You don’t know if the couple turns out okay, and you’re not meant to. As a person that hinges a lot of my personal happiness on a pet that will only live a fraction as long as I will, it terrifies me; I can’t help thinking of my inevitable heartbreak.

The Real Momoka (Sumiko Arai, 2021)

There’s power in a name. Being addressed by the one you prefer can be intensely affirming, while being called something you don’t want to hear can make you feel like an alien in your own body. Even being called by a name you like can color your feelings about someone, depending on the amount of derision or affection you detect in their voice. “It suits you,” says one, but to another “it’s not what I expected.” Maybe your name was bestowed upon you by your parents, or maybe you took it upon yourself to veto their decision—but your relationship to your name is always in flux, at the mercy of whoever last let it part from their lips.

In The Real Momoka, the titular bartender has swapped names with her lover and regular patron, Makoto. The two of them are the only ones in on the secret. To the customers of the bar, “Makoto” is an appropriate name for a handsome woman with boyish charm, but Momoka is conflicted; she’s irritated how well her own name suits someone else, and feels frustrated that it only sounds good coming from someone she loves—but she’s unsure if those feelings are reciprocated. Makoto treats her delicately, the way she feels, rather than like a rough-and-tumble butch. It’s in those intimate moments that Momoka’s name truly feels like it belongs to her. It’s a potent metaphor for one of the reasons we chase after lasting romance: when someone makes you feel whole in a way nobody else does, it’s difficult to let them go.

I chose my name for myself. I’ve been using it ever since I was thirteen. I’ve had periods of being unsure if I’m truly who I say I am, but one thing has always been certain to me: my name sounds really good when someone I love says it to me.

Thank you for reading this second installment of my silly little newsletter. Getting this one out meant a lot to me, because I very nearly gave up on this creative venture and let it die on the vine. I’m glad I didn’t. I feel like I’ve accomplished a couple of important things. I’ve memorialized my friend Nicky in a way that makes sense to me, and my head feels clear in a way that it hasn’t since the day that I lost them. I followed through on something that’s strictly for myself, for once. And most importantly, I didn’t succumb to that ever-present desire to go into hiding just because things have been rough. Besides! I’ve got far too many good ideas to let them go to waste. I’m currently working on another one, so you can probably expect the next issue sooner rather than later.

If you’d like to donate, there’s a link below where you can do that. A couple of kind souls have done so already, despite the fact that I’m far too anxious to draw too much attention to the existence of the page. Whether you do or don’t, you have my thanks. I’m just happy that anybody wants to read what I’ve written.

By the way, you might have noticed the extremely adorable new icon at the top of the page. It was drawn by my friend BIG LOU. He’s amazing!! You should hit him up if you want someone to draw a funny guy for you.

Be safe. See you soon. I need a nap. Good night.

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Hello, and welcome to the inaguaral post of my newsletter. I’ve long insisted that this would be the year I finally allow myself some time to be selfish—to follow my own whims and write some things that are strictly for my own fulfillment—for the past several years since I’ve been writing full-time. And while I’ve produced a body of work that I’m immensely proud of, I find myself feeling frustrated by the limitations of the channels that I publish through. My interests run deep, and they pull me violently by every extremity in every direction; the more I resist in an effort to stay focused, the more I feel I am likely to be ripped apart.

The goal of starting this little newsletter is to be a little kinder to myself—to indulge my desire to write an essay about whatever excites me, to interview whomever I think would be cool to talk to, and to remind myself that my thoughts are worth having even if I don’t get paid for them. I’ve got a lot of things planned for this space that may be of interest to you, or they may only interest me. In order to properly extend that kindness to myself, I’ve elected—to the best of my ability—not to care if the former applies.

It may seem like a contradiction, then, that most of the words herein won’t even be my own. I’ve decided to cede the spotlight to some trusted friends, whom I’ve invited to share reflections of their year. I asked everyone to provide up to two lists of up to ten items. No mandates on topics, scope, or length—because I wanted these to feel like honest reflections of the way their time was spent. The reason I wanted to start things off this way is simple: relearning to bare my heart to other people again has changed me for the better and rekindled warm feelings I’ve long felt were permanently lost. Everyone here has given me some encouragement, they’ve shown an interest in what makes me tick, or they’ve simply given me space to be myself—and I want to give back. To me, it makes perfect sense as a way to show what my heart is made of. There’s a little reflection of myself in all of them.

This is by no means a comprehensive buddy list, nor is it exclusive; these are just the ones I felt brave eneough to pester for their contributions on fairly short notice. Whether they’ve chosen to share a lot or a little about themselves, I’ve learned a lot from each of them. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again at the end. 💜

—Shy Clara Thompson

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buddy list 2023

Nicky Austin

I catch myself thinking a lot some days about the disposability of art. Nearly a century ago, people would use Action Comics #1 to start their fireplace. There are a lot of people out there that see music as window dressing, a backdrop to their night out with their friends. An average artist will just pour their entire being into their work and for someone out there, that whole stretch of time is just someone’s commute. This isn’t a bad thing, we’re all creatures that process our surroundings in different ways. I just think my brain runs this thought through my body once or twice every few months in a feeble attempt to give me some perspective, to not sweat the small stuff all the time… to remind myself that I’m just someone else trying to get by. Some people save lives for a living, others build furniture, I try to crunch the numbers in my brain as to exactly why Godzilla makes me feel the way he does. There are people that listen to that. We have weird jobs. 

I like a lot of weird and dumb stuff. Pop culture stuff. I’ve fostered a lifelong fascination with the concept of “Low Art” and workmanlike storytellers sprawling themselves out on an inherently capitalist structure. Looking at a promotional box of candy and seeing the human being that expressed some truly weird, hilarious thoughts in word bubbles and song lyrics. I’ve never been much of an economist but I guess that relationship between art and money means something to me. I wanna make a lot of both! I want the faith that if I ever toiled away at something from inside of some unknowable contemptible machine, they’d be able to look at it and see me inside of there. Some of those machines are so well-built they make sure you can’t see anybody inside. So over the years, I guess I’ve trained my eyes to look for people in those things and appreciate them when they make something truly special. This year, I think I got to see malfunctions new and old. 

Moving from this year to the next, I think I’ve learned to cherish my friends and family some more. I’ve lost people, I’ve gained more. I attended a nearly empty memorial service so full of silent resentment and awkward trauma that it made me sick and I’ve resolved to make sure I never leave something like that behind. I’ve tossed and turned about my artistic and financial future and I still don’t have answers or opportunities. I co-wrote the best song I’ve made to date. I’m so fucking tired and so fucking frustrated but I’m also so, so full of love and appreciation. I don’t know how to feel. It’s been an incredibly hard year and I think after about a decade of hard years I’m done making resolutions. All I know is that I experienced some incredible things, good and bad, and that I want to be confident enough to provide some cool stuff to others going forward. 

May the next year bring us more. I want more words to process pain, pictures to render truth in imagination. I want songs to sprout forth when I think of them and the ability to make it real. I want good movies, funny jokes and really fucking delicious food. I want more dumb comics to read every Sunday with my friends, I want more songs with ridiculous writing decisions to gawk at. For every difficult thing this year represented for me, I want next year to give me more. I’m done with indecision. This year’s an abandoned house and I want to move out because from where I’m standing next year is a warm bed.

Top 10 Individual Manga Chapters Published in Shonen Jump Magazine in 2022

1. Hunter x Hunter, chapter 397

2. One Piece, chapter 1045

3. RuriDragon, chapter 5

4. Akane-Banashi, chapter 28

5. Sakamoto Days, chapter 100

6. PPPPPP, chapter 61

7. Ayashimon, chapter 24

8. Undead Unluck, chapter 132

9. Me & Roboco, chapter 100

10. Jujutsu Kaisen, chapter 183

10 Creatively Inspiring Rock Songs I First Heard in 2022

• COWPERS - “Cian”

• 12 Rods - “Red (4/9 New Version)”

• Walrus - “Hikari no Kakera”

• The Hated - “Someone”

• Susquatch - “After the Thaw”

• GEZAN - “DNA”

• Piebald - “Mess With the Bulls”

• Veltpunch - “7”

• There Is a Light That Never Goes Out - “Distance”

• Popcatcher - “Punkrockauthority”

Leah Duff

This was my first full year of truly being home. My wife and I moved to Vermont in April of last year, leaving behind a whole metropolitan area filled with ghosts. When we landed, we immediately wanted to dig our roots very deep into the soil. But the thing is, you can’t force roots; they have to grow on their own. This year, they took.

It’s taken me living here with my wife—we two now legally ordained, as of May this year—to understand that home isn’t just a person, a place or a particular feeling. I mean, it is those things, yes, but in order to be home you need your self to be at peace.

So maybe what I really mean is that this was my first full year of truly being at peace.

I’ve spent most of my adult life living for others. I don’t say that to cast aspersions on anyone or to sound like sour grapes, but I just didn’t ever really think about myself. I’d learned at a very young age that casting off parts of myself made life easier for others, and it made me more palatable for others. 

So over time, I cast off my rough edges. I cast off my video games in college. I cast off anime and manga in young adulthood. I cast off my faith to appease some pain. I cast off community to live for someone else.

But this year, in this place, with this woman, I finally let myself be me. I re-found the things that made my heart glow; I bought my deeply loved SEGA systems and I spent a whole afternoon touching them to see if I could recover all of my memories (I did). I bought a ring to give to my wife to finally rectify how I had failed my own heart before. I bought MiniDisc players (lots of them) to reclaim a small part of the carefree youth I wish I had.

I also finally found community. I found a place that reinvigorated my dream for how the internet could connect people. I found a church that doesn’t hate me.

This year, I found home.

Top 5 Sports Happenings

• The Tour De France Femmes being run for the first time in 30+ years

• Mark Canha’s 3 run home run against the Phillies on August 21st

• Alyssa Naeher’s stop against Germany in November

• The entire Japan vs. Germany match at the World Cup

• Munetaka Murakami breaks the NPB’s all time home run record and he does it playing for my beloved Swallows

Top 5 Things That Made Me Cry (That weren’t real genuine harm or hurt)

• Lightning talking to a robot who lost his friends (Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns)

• The donuts I made, having never thought I could make something so delicious

• A video of my wife playing the guitar for me when I was apart from her in Europe

• When my wife proposed to me and we got married

• Having a delicious decaf coffee to wind down in the evening after a hard day

golok

despite having a good group of friends in relatively close physical proximity and a wonderful significant other with whom i spend most of my time with, i’m prone to feeling very alone (i should really stop staying up so late). some of the other freaks here on this thing have played a large part in easing that whole feeling which i am endlessly grateful for. thanks for posting 4s4ki like ten months ago shy, you have thoroughly rearranged my ears.

movies i watched this year that i'll be thinking about for a long time

• 0.5 mm (dir. Momoko Ando, 2014)

• After Life (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)

• Come Drink with Me (dir. King Hu, 1966)

• Cure (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

• Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-Wook, 2022)

• Drive My Car (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

• Irma Vep (dir. Olivier Assayas, 1996)

• Still Life (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006)

• The Novelist's Film (dir. Hong Sang-Soo, 2022)

• The River (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1997)

2022 records that i liked a lot

• 4s4ki - Killer in Neverland

• Chat Pile - God's Country

• Cloud Rat - Threshold

• Haru Nemuri - Shunka Ryougen

• Utada Hikaru - BADモード

• macaroom - inter ice age 4

• My Little Airport - 跟你開玩笑

• Nanoray - Digimaiden

• Negative Plane - The Pact

• Sobs - Air Guitar

Jai

The last few years I kind of feel like I was stuck. I don’t think it was in any particular stand out way, but it was like being caught on a treadmill. Just looping round and round, and not really feeling like I was progressing. This year, I like to think I finally managed to break through and start making and enjoying things again. At the very least, I feel like I’m on the right path now. 

I started reading more often. I watched almost 300 films this year and I tried to write at least something on Letterboxd for every film I saw. I made several YouTube Poops of a guy I went to school with’s car review videos and he still has no idea they exist. And I’m incredibly proud of the fifteen minute long video I made for the GOBLIN BUNKER PUBLIC ACCESS 2 charity stream. I learnt a pretty valuable lesson over the last twelve months—I need to watch a movie at least once every two weeks or I get restless. Like an extremely flaccid version of The Hulk who gets satiated with Japanese films. 

It’s important to remember art is meant to be enjoyable. Getting to share films with my parents or with friends of mine has really re-opened my eyes to the brilliance of art. Thinking about it critically should come from a place of wanting to answer questions in our own head. I managed to get out of my own way with regards to that this year. I’m planning to create and release way more stuff in 2023, and I think my goal is to try and enjoy that. I know things in the world seem worse than ever, and I’m not gonna lie and act like everything’s actually fine—I don’t know nearly enough about the world to make a claim like that. But at the very least that seems to be driving me lately. If I can’t rely on the world, I’ll just have to put what I want to exist into it.

My 10 Favourite Films I Saw for the First Time This Year

• Minbo (dir. Juzo Itami, 1992)

• Chungking Express (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

• Ali (dir. Michael Mann, 2001)

• Kids Return (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 1996)

• His Motorbike, Her Island (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

• Mikey and Nicky (dir. Elaine May, 1976)

• The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2006)

• Throw Down (dir. Johnnie To, 2004)

• Southland Tales (dir. Richard Kelly, 2006)

• Mera Naam Joker (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1970)

10 Things I Loved This Year

• Berserk — I finally got to read and get up to date with all of Kentaro Miura’s masterpiece and, suffice to say, it is easily one of my favourite stories I’ve ever experienced. Sorry in advance for how annoying I will be about it.

• Juzo Itami’s Filmography — Itami’s films are funny, tragic, satiric and ultimately, about how much he loves his wife (and not in a Paul W. S. Anderson kind of way). I really appreciated getting to see someone express just how much they love the community around them, and seeing that they want it to grow in a sustainable way. Imagine being so good at what you do that the Yakuza have to get involved. RIP to a legend.

• Nimtoh’s Korean Fried Chicken — It is legitimately one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. I’ve written multiple paragraphs to friends about how much I love their wings.

• La Roche-Posay Anthelios UVMUNE 400 Hydrating Cream SPF50 — Take care of your skin, even if you have melanin. It only protects from one UV type!

• Babbu - “Gaddi Red Challenger” — I’ve been a fan of the Canadian-Punjabi YouTuber scene since before I was a teenager, and I’ve always loved their style of balancing sincerity with comedy. Gaddi Red Challenger is both a hilarious parody of classic Punjabi braggadocious tracks and one of the best car tunes of the year.

• Oral-B Pro 3 Electric Toothbrush with Smart Pressure Sensor, 3500, Pink — Get an electric toothbrush if you don’t have one. My last electric toothbrush was one of the first things I bought with my own money and I broke it almost immediately within the week I got it. I used it in that condition for the next three years to spite myself.

• Final Fantasy X — Okay, I realise I’m very very very late to this. But it’s good! I had never played much of this series outside of VII (after getting a third degree burn from XIII as a teenager). Playing with a group of friends in a giant chat and showing each other where we were at in the game really gave me a new appreciation for JRPGs as a whole. They’re shared stories! The genre reminds me of how things like Chaucher’s Canterbury Tales would’ve been shared between giant audiences.

• Better Call Saul — One of my friends pointed out that this is the only show that we’ve seen starting from the first day it aired till its last. Thank God it was good. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do that with anything again. I remember several of us huddling around my friend’s iPhone 6 Plus in the school library to watch episodes during free periods in school. 

• The Analogue Pocket — This thing is fucking mental man. That screen is outrageously good looking. I can now browse the entire NES library and ultimately decide I don’t want to play any of them at a moment's notice.

• All of my friends — It’s unreal to me how many great people I’ve gotten to know this year. It’s been a pleasure hanging out with all of you. I feel like I found a piece of myself that was missing until now. I really am thankful to have such wonderful people around me who encourage each other to be better. And of course, a massive thank you to all the knuckleheads who had already been tolerating me for years. I love all of you guys.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Once again it is the end of the year and I am grieving how little time I have in my one small life but am mostly celebrating the riches it offers. It is beautiful that I am able to partake in any of it at all. I often set longterm goals to orient myself, but am pretty lax about actually succeeding. Really, this is a way to help me assess what I care about, and what I think I want to be caring about in the years to come. It wouldn’t be fun if I turned out exactly the way I wanted, right?

Ten Goals for the First Half of My 30s (in order of when they’re likey to be completed)

1. Pay off all my student loans

2. Learn how to swim

3. Go to the Galápagos and work alongside researchers and other science teachers

4. Interview my grandma about her life before she passes away

5. Finish writing my book

6. Get involved with programming avant-garde films in Chicago (and do so on at least 5 different occasions)

7. Get obsessed with a new art form and have it define my life in a substantial way

8. Be able to consistently cook all the different Korean dishes I love from my mom

9. Become more proficient in speaking Spanish and Korean

10. Feel confident that during these years I was still making a concerted effort to be a good friend, brother, son, uncle, partner, etc.

Mocha

Hello. I am Mocha, a 3x year old Fujoshi in love with mecha anime, tokusatsu series, and sci-fi in general. I was invited to share a list of things I enjoyed this year, so I compiled a list of the anime I spent time with which spoke to me for one reason or another. You’ll notice a mixture of old and new things. 

My approach to engaging with my hobbies has always been relatively free-spirited and erratic, especially as I’ve grown older and found my free-time to grow ever more precious. I make the effort to keep up, but I’m also just as likely to revisit old favorites rather than venture through the backlog from hell. April and October were both taken by a trip down nostalgia lane with Haruhi and Lucky Star…

One of these happens to still be airing, but it’s close enough to ending that we can let it slide, right?

10 Anime I Watched in 2022

1. Akiba Maid War — The PV initially turned me right off, but then I decided to give it a chance. I’ve never been more angry about absolutely falling in love with a show. This is about the best elevator pitch I can make for it without saying too much.

2. Spirited Away — I make it a point to watch at least one Ghibli film a year, and this year happened to be Spirited Away. I don’t think there’s anything that has been left unsaid about this film. It’s the film that put Ghibli on the road to international stardom, and in some ways, a film they never really surpassed.

3. Toku Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru Setsugetsuka — My sword boy gacha game got a film trilogy this year. A selfish pick.

4. The Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These : Sakubou - Season 4 of the new adaptation of the Final Boss of anime. For those new to LotGH or have been putting it off for years, Die Neue These is a good starting option to dip your toes into. If you like the story but aren’t a fan of the visuals, move onto the older adaptation. The novels are my preference.

5. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - I was part of the Haruhi generation of otaku, so I can’t deny my continued love for this series is at least partially nostalgia.  That said, I’m not so blinded that I can’t see why younger generations have bounced off so hard. Saying that certain aspects haven’t aged particularly well is a bit of an understatement, but if you can get past it, the heart of the show still shines bright.

6. Lucky Star - Every show needs a good hype man, right? Lucky Star is that to Haruhi. It’s impossible to disentangle it from mid-2000s otaku culture. That said, outside of the increasing Haruhi fellation as it goes on, Lucky Star is honestly more timeless than people give it credit for.

7. Galaxy Express 999 (film) - I had previously only seen the television series before renting this one. The film abridges the story heavily, creating a much tighter storyline, albeit one that necessarily loses some of the flavor. Most probably won’t mind too much, however. 

8. Love After World Domination - A lovely romantic comedy where the Red Ranger of a sentai team and a villainess fall in love, and attempt to hide their relationship. You owe it to yourself to give it a try if you’re into the Super Sentai series or are a lapsed MMPR fan.

9. Delicious Party Precure - I’ve watched the annual Precure series for a good number of years now, and it’s a little unfair to be too harsh to Delicious Party. Production issues outside of the control of the studio really rained on its parade, costing the series five of its episodes. A middling Precure show is still a pretty good time, however, if you’re a new fan, perhaps try Heartcatch or Tropical Rouge first instead.

10. Mobile Suit Gundam Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island - I’m a massive Gundam fan, which is why I have some mixed feelings about this movie. It’s well made and will certainly please any Gundam fan that’s less grumpy than I am (It is difficult to argue against that South Cross Corps fight), but it ultimately feels like that episode has been overly stretched out to just under two hours without much of anything new to add onto it.

Bryan Rollins

This year had a lot in it for me. I spent a lot of time evaluating relationships, and it was good to connect and re-connect with all of my friends. Also got to re-connect with media again and remembered just how important that has always been to me too.

10 Songs

• Joyce Wrice - “Chandler”

• Snoh Aalegra - “IN YOUR EYES”

• Planet Giza - “LIMB”

• Perfume - “Drive'n The Rain”

• Freddie Gibbs - “Rabbit Vision”

• Larry June - “Another Day, Pt. 2”

• Utada Hikaru - “誰にも言わない” (Darenimo iwanai)

• KIRINJI - “時間がない” (Jikanga Nai)

• Yes You - “Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime (Tentendo Remix)”

• Amerie - “Why Don't We Fall in Love”

10 Game Boy Games

• Golf (Nintendo)

• The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls (Nintendo)

• Looney Tunes (Sunsoft)

• Nemesis (Konami)

• Vattle Giuce (Natsu System)

• Pop'n Twinbee (Konami)

• Magical Chase (Quest)

• Dragon Quest Monsters 2 (Tose)

• beatmania GB2: Gotcha Mix (Konami)

• Sagaia (Taito)

Ryan Waller

It’s been a difficult year in a couple ways for me, but it’s also been huge in many ways. I got published, and that was an unreal feeling. I couldn’t even believe that it finally happened. Didn’t get paid, but at the same time, holy shit! Hopefully, this’ll lead to more opportunities in the future.

At the start of the year I was working my first real deal job in a field that I’m actually interested in. The whole endeavor ended poorly in July and I’ve been adrift since. In a lot of ways, I’ve emotionally backslid a lot, and I can feel that affecting the people around me and harming my relationships. The people I care about are getting sick of me, and that’s a sobering, difficult feeling to process. At any rate, I’m trying to work on myself, and become a better person. A person worth being around and loving.

The art I’ve interacted with this year has helped immensely, however. For the first time in my life, I feel like my vision is clear. My interests and focuses have been all over the place my whole life, and it feels like for the first time, I can really clearly see a path in front of me creatively. Everything I’ve been studying for years feels like it’s all connecting and making sense. It’s a terrifying and exciting feeling, and I can’t thank my friends enough for helping me think through it all. I couldn’t ask for a better group of weirdos to be in community with.

Current Best New Albums I’ve Heard So Far this Year 2022

1. Billy Woods - Aethiopes

2. Moreru - 山田花子

3. Klein - Cave in the Wind

4. CEO Trayle - HH5

5. Oxbow & Peter Brötzmann - An Eternal Reminder of Not Today/Live at Moers

6. Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band - Stone Stone Stone

7. Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems

8. KMRU & Aho Ssan - Limen

9. JUSTICE - JUSTICE 

10. Congotronics International - Where’s the One

Albums That Form My Personal Roadmap for Further Personal and Artistic Development as Well as Provide Strong Exercise for My Mind... Also 2022

1. Asake - Mr. Money with the Vibe

2. Chat Pile - God’s Country

3. Asleep Country - Helvetic Sylph

4. Cecil Taylor - Respiration

5. Papé Nziengui - Kadi Yombo

6. Ärid - From Anthropophagic Waste Breeds a Writhing Mutagenesis

7. Minami Saeki/Ayami Suzuki/Taku Sugimoto/Takashi Masubuchi - Improvisation at Permian

8. Keiko Higuchi - Vertical Language

9. Joy Guidry - Radical Acceptance

10. Laddio Bolocko - 97-99

Patrick Lynn Wilson

The following represent a scattershot jotting of some things I was into throughout 2022, mere expressions of interest which could only serve to cause pain unto my person and undue scorn directed at me from my peers and the public at large.

Lynn's Most Disreputable of 2022

• How Stella Got Her Groove Back / Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 35mm screening @ Music Box Theatre, February 2022 — Among the more provocative film screenings caught in 2022 were the two series of Highs & Lows at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre bookending the year in February and September. A grinning showcase of art flicks paired with mass-market Hollywood studio stuff; it served as proof of the durability of the double feature as a contemporary programming decision. If there was more than an element of the disreputable in the choice to schedule these movies with a slight smirk on one’s face, then the cost was worth it. The gorgeous print of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, followed by an explicitly Sirkian melodrama allowed for post-screening conversations surrounding the eternal question: would Jam & Lewis have exec-produced the soundtrack to a Fassbinder movie, had RWF lived into the 1990s? Sound off in the comments.

• Playing VNs on Switch & Steam Deck — Shouts out to these two doohickeys for allowing me ways to play highly disreputable sicko shit with ease. I had a blast playing the shoddy localization of Chaos Head;Noah on the Switch and found the Steam Deck to be the ideal vessel for jamming on the remake of Doukyuusei among other VNs like Gore Screaming Show, both highly sensitive games for perverts that are miracles for existing in English translations. The Steam Deck is truly the successor to the hacked Vita and the hacked Switch in this sector.

• Musical revivals — This year saw the surprise releases of new LPs from two outfits long-dormant, Gospel and City of Caterpillar. Gospel’s The Loser reimagines 2000s emotional hardcore as organ swirl prog licking its wounds and City of Caterpillar’s Mystic Sisters strikes after sullen atmospheres, quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, and suggests neither band ever actually left the stage. Both dominated my 2022 listening. And towards the end of the year, Singapore’s Sobs dropped their debut Air Guitar, an album redolent of nothing so much as the pop-punk sweetness of my youth, serving as a Proustian madeleine for the mall food courts of another age. To top it all off and add insult to injury by firing a literal bullet into my fucking literal head, Sobs have the nerve to end their album with a transcendent cover of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool.” For one who spent 8th grade mercilessly searching for the perfect synthesis of Ozma’s “Domino Effect” crossed with Lush’s “Hypocrite,” I feel like I’ve spotted a long-lost constellation. Late Q4 shoutout to Matcha Potato Salad's collected tracks, a bedroom shibuya-kei revival whatsit that echoes bittersweet memories of twerking to Fantastic Plastic Machine in my dorm.

• Immortality — Big white elephant art masquerading inna termitic stylee, yeah, but Immortality comes closer to capturing the feeling of a collective engaged in theatre/film production than likely any video game will until some itch.io-brained soul adapts Out 1: Noli me tangere to RPGMaker2003. It’s as infectious as the first day of summer camp. 13 Sentinels was a watershed for doling out sheets of its mille-feuille narrative in a different order for each player, offering every audience a unique stacking of its plot no matter what; Immortality suggests something similar, building upon the space for narrative possibility in Western titles. It does so with a thoroughly twisted take on art that avoids the usual pat motifs on creation, a cruel little curlicue about weirdos who like to act and fuck. A healthier conception of sex and/or boobs has rarely been glimpsed in Western games heretofore.

• TrueAnon podcast series on Synanon — A special listening experience, underscoring how all roads in the USA lead back to the cult beginnings of the troubled teen industry and beyond. It combines historical exegesis, documentary reporting, radio drama, and searing bile. I found myself highly moved while folding laundry to it.

• Boutique releases of dubious cinematic properties — One of the more intriguing new upstart boutique Blu-ray labels to spring onto the scene in the past couple of years, Error4444 outdid themselves in 2022 with not only a reverent boxed release of those irreverent totems, Funky Forest / Warped Forest, but also with beguilingly lavish editions of two thoroughly disreputable exploitation flicks, Red Spell Spells Red & Centipede Horror. For two gross-out joints that exist largely as footnotes in the larger story of scuzzy cinema, these releases fête these films as deserving of some sort of merit in a real attempt at contextualization. This enthusiasm is contagious; while the tricked-out discs are brimming with physical extras, they largely eschew fanboy packaging gimmicks in favor of the over-the-top art object and a posture respectful of film history.

• My friendship with Shy — If you could cast a spell to render a portal to last year and tell me that my forthcoming one would be marked by a friendship with the lady I long found myself hopelessly intimidated by, I would tell you that yeah that definitely could happen, but I’m a coward. And yet it did happen—and I’m a more thoughtful person for it. One of the best music writers working; a crack, and cracked, critical intellect, and among the select few to spring to mind when it comes time to recommend a musical discovery or scrutinize deviant PC-98 games—thank you for being a friend.

Shy Clara Thompson

I’ve spilled my guts thoroughly at the top of this post and elsewhere, so I’ll try and keep it brief.

The last few years have brought me a wave of life-affirming revelations. In 2020, I gained the confidence to show my writing to other people. In 2021, I learned that sharing the stories of artists and underrepresented art is the single most fulfilling thing to me. In 2022, I finally pieced together that it was never only about art—I just want to honor everyone that’s had an impact on me.

I spent so much of the latter half of this year evaluating how I’ve built up the fortress around my heart. I still like the protection it offers me, but it’s been nice to do a little renovating; now, I’ve installed a drawbridge to let people in and out. I’ve been convinced for a long time that I don’t really need recommendations from others to have a good time with my interests—and that’s true, I don’t! I have a self-perpetuating curiosity and an engine for discovery that could probably keep me happy forever. But I’m finding more and more that I want to share the paths I’ve traveled, and I don’t mind taking roads that might lead me to civilization.

Recently, I started using my mother’s name in my byline as a way to remind myself how much of her essence still clings to me. If possible, I’d like to start leaving more reminders of the catalysts that continue pushing me to evolve. I suppose this is as good a place to start as any.

10 Manga That Made Me Want to Meet a New Friend

• 3 More Things to Talk About Before Falling Asleep (Chiro & Hasha, 2022)

• Boku no Marie (Sakura Takeuchi, 1994)

• Drifting Body (Michiyo Matsumoto, 1995)

• The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy At All (Sumiko Arai, 2022)

• Korogaru Kyoudai (Tsubumi Mori, 2020)

• My Wandering Warrior Existence (Nagata Kabi, 2020)

• Plica (Sae Amamiya, 1997)

• Renai Joshi File (Akiko Morishima, 2012)

• Super Cub (Tone Koken, 2017)

• V.B. Rose (Banri Hidaka, 2004)

Thank you for reading this monster of a post. If you’re interested in what else I’ve got in the chamber, feel free to subscribe. It doesn’t and will never cost you anything. I have a whole load of interviews with artists and interesting people I will be posting as soon as I can find the time to transcribe them.

Happy new year. Be safe. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

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