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Species: Teru Teru Bōzu Affiliation: Staydeads Generation: 3tard Role: Nuisance

Stat page.

• A Staydead and a humble wiki tender.

Poem(s)

I really fucking hate
coarse salt
I put some in my tomato
and I barely felt it

All it's good for
is meat
Who eats that much meat anyway

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He lives in the Sewers
posting Fumos and shit
He has some weird fetishes
go send him your feet

- by DaKAT

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Based? Based on What?

I hear you say. If you were to ask me to define the word out of the blue, I would need to really think about it. I use “based” every day, but I absolutely have no idea how to describe it to someone else. The dictionary doesn’t help me that much here either, the verb pretty much has no relation to how I use the word. I think the essence of this word is nicely captured by this Urban Dictionary entry, (from 2009, surprisingly. I’ve only seen this word being used this year.): This perfectly illustrates how the modern internet can make something that can be esoteric feel so normal and widely understood to a user. Of course, slang has always existed in the English language, and even before it, but the World Wide Web — the name is quite literal — has connected everyone at instantaneous speeds that evolution of culture, in this case, specifically language, has been accelerated so much, due to the difference in the backgrounds of all its users, trying to catch up and understand each other, not quite assimilating, but more like the synthesis of something new from all of its components.

You could say that internet language evolution is pretty “based” as it simply does not care for the world outside of it, developing only with the input of its users. There is no such thing as a Standard Internet English, like how there is General American or the Queen’s English; many corners of the internet have their own way of speaking that is unique to them. While people from those corners do interact with each other all the time, — one person can be a part of many communities at once — I often see that the rate of change and creation of new words are much faster than the rate at which the language is open to the wider general internet. As such, you get little groups of people who would not understand other groups, creating these niche languages that are very specific to its users. Unfortunately, I have to open the can of absurd self-referential Dadaist worm that is internet memes here, but we have turned the act of speaking itself, into a meme; not in the sense of just telling jokes, as humans had always done, but as in that one’s decision to speak and their words in it of themselves has become something that could have, above comedic value, a way of creating a sense of tribalism and a connection that was not there with such a wide and global language like English.

I love all the dumb things that humans do, especially the dumb ways we use the magical tool that separates us from all the other animals on this planet, spoken and written language. How I see language is that it is like all other technological developments, the past ten thousand years being extremely slow, up to the last couple of centuries years or so, ramping up to speeds that no one ever thought was possible. It will be interesting to see if this means, in a hundred years, we will all be sharing a common tongue, or will present-day English be split into all these non-mutually intelligible niche languages.

Love Live!

Love Live! School Idol Project is a multimedia project with a plot based on a group of Japanese schoolgirls of Otonokizaka Academy, a Tokyo high school with a decreasing admission rate, forcing it to close down. The nine main characters of the story try to prevent their school from closing down by forming a school idol group called μ's (Muse) to increase the number of new students, and eventually go on to be nationally known by joining Love Live, a nationwide school idol competition. The multimedia project includes a two-season animated television series, a movie, a manga, and a mobile game. Here, I will be discussing season one of the TV series.

To most, an anime about music and school idols might seem like something that most people would not enjoy very much. It might feel embarrassing to watch a show about cute girls doing cute things with homosexual undertones and a simple and weak plot instead of another, more action- and story-driven one. At first, knowing nothing of the essence of the franchise and was only attracted by the characters, I felt the same, but when I watched the first episodes, there was an unfamiliar sense of giddiness and attachment to the cast. Watching the girls go through all the troubles to reach the top of the Love Live ranking and succeeding was something that really made me felt involved with the show and the group, something I really did not expect from such a generic plot.

Of course, being a musically themed anime, a lot of emphasis is placed on the songs. Every episode usually has the group performing a song as a live show. The Love Live! project originally started with music CDs and short music videos, which gained a large following. Even at the live concert where the real-life singers and voice actors behind the characters performed the songs and dances, the first one taking place before the anime even released, had large audiences. If you just listened to songs without watching the show, they might just seem like okay or even mediocre J-Pop, but if you watched the show and get passionate about the girls and their endeavors, the songs really make you feel emotional. Listening to the opening sequence of the show gives me goosebumps. Every time the songs come on, I really get compelled to just jump and dance around in my room. They just have so much energy in them; not just happy and cheerful energy, but also that feeling of power and inspiration that really gets me going.

The characters are just extremely enjoyable. There is the leader of the group, Honoka Kousaka, with her always positive and bubbly attitude, cheering everyone up, including the viewers. Then there is shrine maiden, Nozomi Tojo, radiating a sense of motherliness and wisdom to the group. In contrast, there is also the musically talented Maki Nishikino, being, at times, quite stubborn about everything, but eventually reveals that she really does enjoy being an idol.

While I do agree with the statement that the girls do fit into generic archetypes, I do not think this really detracts from the fact that they are all unique in some way and that they all compliment each other. Above all that though, the gang all have a passion for what they do. They all started with flaws, but throughout the series, you can see that they all put effort into improving themselves and that every time they fail at something or when something does not go as planned, they always get back up on their feet and fight on. The high spirit and enthusiasm just really takes you into the story and it just always makes me feel better after seeing them do what they do.

Frankly, the only thing in the show that I really have a strong criticism on is that the art during the performance sequences changes to a 3D style that does not look very good and very noticeable compared to the much smoother and better 2D style. Although there are also times when the 2D animation quality decreases a little, it definitely is not as annoying as the 3D segments.

I do understand that Love Live! is not for everyone, but I do want to urge people who are thinking of getting into musical and idol anime to start watching it. The emotions that they make me feel were really something I never was able to experience with any other styles. For something released 6 years ago, it still has a solid fanbase, making it easy for any new fans to just pop right into it. I highly recommend opening up to looking at things that you would think are embarrassing or tasteless, you might just end up enjoying it as much as I have.

Future Myopia and Alienation: The Gen Z Condition

The Future has usually always been an exciting time. But as members of Generation Z, as the generation that is growing into adulthood into such strange times -- strange times not just because of the immediate recency of the pandemic, but more generally, the new millennia and its increasingly cybernetic method of social living -- the Future has not been a place for comfort.

Past generations always had a vision, perhaps not of the Future, but of a future: the future of their projection of an ideal utopia, where progress has moved beyond what could ever possibly be thought of. Alas, here we are in the year 2021, supposedly beyond past imagination, -- without sentient AI robots, massive Evangelion mechs, the cure for cancer, or a galaxy conquering Starfleet -- that future of past generations, to Gen Z, is now just an aesthetic, a paradoxical retro-futuristic cyberpunk neon Tokyo that has nothing to do with the aspirations of the forwards yet-to-be-conceived time. A, perhaps, cultural, future already exists, but the temporal Future is no longer something we can look forward to, as there is nothing to look forward to.

The Doomer Zoomer outlook may be just that angsty teen phase that every generation went through, but its prevalence and general hopelessness and nihilism of zoomers may suggest that there is a real cultural temporal short-sightedness at play. This Future Myopia, as I like to call it, is felt in a mode of existence in which the everlasting present dominates any hope for a future, where temporal contexts and the specificity of location in time are lost and replaced with a continuously flowing cage of the now.

This can easily be seen in the specific cultural style to a period of time: the 50s had Elvis Presley; the 60s, The Beatles; 70s, the rise of disco; 80s, new wave; 90s, hip-hop. But in the In the 2000s and later, this markedness of the era through cultural styles starts to disappear. Pop music is no longer popular music, but rather just another genre of music in the ever-evolving pool of styles that divides like cells in a Petri dish. Perhaps accidentally provoking the related Fukuyaman concept, but it is this explicitly postmodern “lack of a grand narrative” in which there are no longer mainstream trends, but instead a deeper breakdown of people into smaller, more niche microcultures, facilitated by the move of socialization on to the decentralized Internet.

Future Myopia and Alienation

continued

For us “extremely online teens”, this can be seen in the, perhaps more familiar, phenomenon of meme culture. In meme history, the current period may be called meta-irony, where within the irony being employed in a meme is often its sincere message, or perhaps where the irony used has no base truth to contradict in the first place. I would regard such use of the meme itself as only a stylistic trend in presentation. Instead, I would point to the nostalgic acceptance of old memes (perhaps more accurately phrased as the cyclical use of obsolete memes), which I see as a movement, not simply stylistic, but rather behavioral, from sincerity through irony to post-/meta-irony, from the cringe of the past to a repurposing of a dead format. If memes can not die, then we see again this lack of marked time context, with all culture instead being a mass of formats of presentation being used to present the same things over and over again.

Meme virology also shows the dynamics of the niche microcultures of the Internet. A meme may start as a small in-joke within some specific community, making it way through a wider audience, and then trickles down back into a format for niche memes in small communities. A platform-wide connection never happens and interactions only persist in a “local” community, all ever diverging from each other, into their own kind of insanity. This creates a sense of alienation from the world at large, and if one is too slow in catching up with the trend of the day and loses touch with their small and rapidly evolving community, it is very easy to feel alienated in the place that is their only source of socialization.

It is from here, I make my case, that it is necessary for us to study these phenomena, from a scholarly view, to orient ourselves within cyberspace and (cyber)time. In the case of memes, we must create a meme cartography, in order to traverse both the real social spaces and the abstract space where our minds perceive these memes. Future Myopia and alienations are the nature, not of just the Gen Z Condition, but of the 21st century itself. To be caught in this paralysis, from lack of belonging, in time and social space, prevents any realization of our desires, even before those desires can be conceived: not to ground ourselves to immediate reality, but rather to break free of the prison of the present and regain our agency for the Future.

Future Myopia and Alienation

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