Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Let's begin here with celebrating fifty years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and fifty years of what might be the most unique theatrical experience someone goes to when they go to see Rocky. (And the fact that while the thing on the screen stays the same when you go to see Rocky, everything else changes depending on where you are and what time it is.)

Organizations that fail to consider intersectionality in their diversity, equity, and inclusion will create things like employee resource groups that only capture a part of someone's experience and that elide the places where the intersectionality is unique and important. Which should make you unsurprised, but also horrified, that the Institute for Museum and Library Services budget is being given directly to propagandists for a project that will present a white man-centric view of history and demand that we all believe it as the sole and only truthful narrative of the United States.

James Dobson, creator of such abominations unto his God as Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance, has gone to receive judgment at 89 years of age. Our world is far better off without him, and the damage that he has done to the world would take generations to heal if he were the only one doing his kind of damage. But like so many others, he has disciples and followers, and they will continue to perpetuate his damage into the world for generations to come.

A man who believed that violence was an answer, and who aggressively sowed the wind wherever he went, has reaped the whirlwind, killed by the violence he promoted, by a gun that he believed should have more rights than the people killed by it. He is no longer able to use his organization to promote and encourage harm to others.

( The fallout from such, and plenty of other things, inside )

Last out, Bohemian Rhapsody translated and performed in Zulu and with the visual and singing styles of several other African traditions. It's worth a watch and a listen, absolutely.

The concept of Queer Time, where the signifiers of "adulthood" like marriage, children, and houses are not achieved on any kind of regular time, if at all, and therefore queer adults have to find their own ways of demonstrating to the community that they are full grown-ass adults.

And the iconic Atari CX-10 joystick as a decanter for drinking, along with a couple of Atari-logo glasses.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Let us begin with a promise from the company distributing the movie The Toxic Avenger to erase at least $5 million in medical debt, with each additional million past 5 made at the box office resulting in another million dollars' worth of medical debt destroyed. (The debt itself will not cost $1 million to acquire, as much of the outstanding debt is bought from various debt collection companies for significantly lower than face value.)

If you're looking for something that takes most of the strangeness of a comic book universe and lets it be strange and odd, while also being very entertaining, The television adaptation of The Middleman is available to stream and download from the Internet Archive. There aren't enough episodes of it, and it would do well with a revival, but you can enjoy it for the moment.

If you are on a Typepad-hosted or Typepad-managed blog or service, export all necessary data and assets before September 30, 2025, otherwise all of your material will be inaccessible permanently. Typepad is shutting down, and this is their attempt to allow people to export everything before they turn it all off.

( These always feel like so much happens in such a short time )

Last out, a spiky dinosaur that new fossils suggest may have grown spikes from the neck at least a meter long, in addition to all the other spiny points.

A web application designed to tell you what kinds of animals you are picking up and putting down with authority, based on what weights you tell it you can lift and put down with authority. What Animal Do You Even Lift, Bro?

And a story of stones, and reforging the rings around them as the people who those stones were given to reforge themselves closer and closer to the people who they are. Nate and Lee have a wonderful relationship, and this shows in in so many ways.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

So, on the recommendation of many (including seeing things related to it popping up in my channels regularly, and a fair number of people who are apparently all-in for the main trio being a trio romantically), I watched KPop Demon Hunters.

Have some non-spoilery thoughts, in no particular order:

• I wonder how ONCE feels about having gotten TWICE to be the group doing the movie credits version of one of the songs played in snippets throughout the movie.


• Daniel Dae Kim and Ken Jeong make perfect sense for the roles they're cast in.


• Speaking of voices, the one they cast for the greater-scope villain was delightfully correct, although the casting direction seems to have suggested that he move in the direction of "clipping syllables in an English-as-Second-Language" way. I don't want someone to speak in something that isn't comfortable to them, or to not sound like themselves, but it felt more like a conscious direction rather than someone's natural cadence to do it that way, and it made the greater-scope villain come off slightly more like a Bond villain being played for a bit of camp than as the greater-scope villain. Maybe I'm reading too much into the delivery, or maybe the intention was for this character to sound just slightly off from the rest of the cast.


• The Netflix subtitlers managed not to figure out something that fansubbers of various Asian series have known for decades, and even those who subtitle K-Pop releases: how to properly subtitle songs. Which is a major strike against them for a movie that has an awful lot of singing! We didn't necessarily have to go full-on for the kind of karaoke-style, rainbow, motion-filled subtitles that fansubbers of anime and toku series got (get?) made fun of for using in their releases, but these subtitlers went in the direction of just putting the syllables of the words in the subtitles, or otherwise doing Revised Romanization of the spoken or sung Korean and leaving it at that. So there's no context to those lines, nor what they look like in Hangul (which you can see in one of the shots that is the behind-the-scenes for TWICE recording the song playing over the first part of the credits), nor a translation of what the Korean says into English (or whichever language you want as the subtitles.) Admittedly, it would be more offensive to just put [Korean] or [Speaking/Singing in a Global Language] for those sections, but only just. The purpose of the subtitling there is so that someone can follow along with the audio track and make sure they're not missing anything, and if the audio track includes singing in Korean or rapping in Korean, as it does in this movie, the subtitlers have a responsibility to render it comprehensibly. (Bets on whether Tumblr has a transcript of all the songs that renders them correctly and translates them correctly at this point?)
  
  I'm very unhappy with the job the subtitlers did on this movie, and I think Netflix needs to release a revision to accurately reflect what happens in the movie.


• I suspect there are more than a few things about the movie that I missed, because my understanding of symbology of both Korean cosmology and mythology and the intricacies of K-pop fandom isn't as complete as it should be to fully appreciate what's going on here. (I did at least understand the light sticks, banners, appearances on various shows and the part where the performers are basically on their public game anywhere the public might see them, which includes never ever wanting to say or do anything that would say there was a relationship between idols and anyone at all, including other idols. Not that it stops the fans from shipping them, either in their own groups or possibly with other groups that they're seen with or rivals with.) Most of my understanding of K-Pop comes from people like brithistorian and andersenmom, so thank you for your help and answering the silly questions that I've had over time.
  
  I did appreciate the music through the decades montage at the beginning, and I'm not sure the average watcher will realize just how much Korean music is influenced by American styles of music through those eras, before the phenomenon that we know of as K-pop comes into existence. (And which exchanges/inherits a fair amount of its cues and norms with Japanese pop idol culture, such that we think of them as J-pop and K-pop, at least over here in my neck of cultural existence.)


• Related to this, however, it looks like Sony Animation went with the same general style and animation timing that they used on the Spider-Verse movies at times while I was watching it. While, for Spider-Verse, the animation timing is a deliberate decision and works for the comic-book nature of the multiverse being portrayed, here, the dance sequences that should be smooth as butter in the animation, probably even with some extra key frames to make sure it all goes well, several of them hitched and were otherwise more jerky than I would have expected out of a studio trying to match the intricate choreography that can accompany K-pop. It's possible that these hitches and jerkiness were my Internet connection having hiccups or my computer having a hitch, but I don't think so. Others can tell me how smooth their watch was of the movie, but for the moment, I'm chalking this up to Sony Animation's house style and timing clashing with what you would want animated K-Pop to look like. (There were noticeably fewer hiccups in the action sequences, which is why I think I think it was a style decision rather than a slowdown, because action animation would be more likely to have degradation than the dance sequences, in my opinion.)


• Yes, but what did you think about the plot?
  
  It was a perfectly serviceable plot. You'll recognize all the beats if you watched the first Frozen movie, although it is harsher to the lesser-scope villain than most Disney films would be. This particular version of the movie leans heavier into the "Demon Hunters" part of the title, and I don't know if that was the right decision for the plot, because the plot sets up both a movie where action and stylish fighting, accompanied by singing, will determine the outcome (the direction they took) and a movie where the principal heroines and their principal opposition are in a for-all-the-marbles stakes idol game to be determined by who has the bigger fanbase after the agreed-upon final duel at the Idol Awards competition. That would have made the K-pop part of it much more important, and given them all the tools they needed to wage an epic battle across various releases, appearances, and the rest that wouldn't have to involve all that many attempts at direct sabotage or fighting between the two groups, even if there was an awful lot of things that could be excused as "special effects." I'm pretty sure if the writers had enough experience with how idol systems work and the less than savory elements of the companies and managers of the various idols, they could write a very good movie full of underhanded tactics, diss tracks, "accidental" social media leaks, and all the rest of it. I think focusing on the K-pop aspect would also make the internal divisions and the character conflicts in the protagonist trio work better, as each of them starts giving in to more of their worser aspects in trying to beat their rival team, and that would make the parts of the plot that are about secrets and lies work better, since the character hiding the biggest secret will have had the opportunity to see the very worst aspects of the team and believe such things are their actual selves, instead of their more restrained forms. (Which will also make the ultimate climax portion of the movie work better, as well, to make it much clearer why the protagonist team ends up where they do and the way they do before the final battle.)


• Final thought: The movie could cut the gag about certain members of the trio having heart eyes and popcorn eyes about the prettiness of the pretty boys in the rival group. It doesn't actually contribute to the plot, and it makes the characters shallower in a way that doesn't suit them. They could certainly make commentary on the boys being eye candy, even supernaturally so, because that's how they're drawn to be, but the majority of the movie shows this trio as a focused, work-first, idol trio who want to enjoy their downtime, except for that one member who keeps pushing them to not take their breaks. They're not shown as flighty or otherwise susceptible to that kind of distraction, and they primarily work through it when it happens, so thy could just cut the gag entirely and replace it with something else that would work better. Like an offhand comment about how those boys are trying to get by on their looks, while they're getting by on great songs. And then eventually admit to themselves that the boys have catchy songs, too, but stay primarily focused on making their own, better songs to beat them, since they never really try to change their look to be more attractive to the fans than the pretty boys.

It's prompt Number 7 for the sunshine_revival, and the carnival/fair theme continues, this time with one of the rides that you can usually see from a distance. (And one of the ones that always makes me nervous when it stops and I'm not on the ground.)

When I see this prompt I can't help but think about how what was once old is new again with the rise of neocities websites and newsletters becoming more prominent in fandom. Like a blast from the past, I'm finding character shrines, fanfic archives, game blogs, and maybe it's inspired me to make my own site as well c:

Whether you started with secret mailing lists or only discovered online fandom this year, we all have a journey to call our own. It only feels appropriate our last prompt of the month is...

Challenge #7:

The Ferris Wheel
Journaling: Life in fandom goes through ups and downs. Reminisce about the "wild ride" of your time in fandom or in other online communities.

Creative: Create an image or a photo with the theme "let's go for a ride".

( That which is old is new again. Often because the new has been disappointing. )

We're already more than halfway through the planned sunshine_revival, but that means prompt number five has come to say hello to us.

Challenge #5:

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.

Creative prompt: Write a fic or original story about a character reluctantly doing something they are hesitant about.

( See! Hitler On Ice! See! Jews In Space! )

sunshine_revival posted up their fourth topic, even as the heat continues to hammer the Northern Hemisphere, along with humidity, and many of us hide in our climate controlled buildings against it.

We’re heading towards the middle of July, and I hope the weather is treating you kindly this summer, no matter where you are. Any fun plans so far? I’ve spent this week on the mountain, reconnecting with family and staying in a pretty cool house. And talking about houses…

Challenge #4:

Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.

Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.

( What makes you happy? )

More laughs and happiness later!

sunshine_revival has posted their second prompt. Let's see what they're up to.

The sun is just starting to disappear behind the horizon and crickets can almost be heard over the music and the laughter echoing through the carnival night. You can't see any stars yet, but the twinkling lights of an amusement ride are highlighting the graceful curves of a swan boat and the high arching hearts of the entrance. Grab the hand of a sweetheart or a sweet friend and embark on a journey through the…

Challenge #2:

Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like.

Sentiment and love are…weird for me. Heart pumping is much easier, but that's usually related to fear and anxiety than happiness.

( Happiness and neurodivergence do not always get along with each other. )

It looks like I missed seeing that some people were interested in reviving the (Northern Hemisphere) summer counterpart to the snowflake_challenge at sunshine_revival, and since it was only by happenstance link that I was informed about this, I'm technically behind in my posting, ha. So, let's dive in with the first prompt presented:

It's time to bring some light to your journal! Now you can do this in two ways, though you can twist the light in whatever way helps you along ^_^ I know to some it can be intimidating to shine a light on yourself. But know somebody will appreciate you for it!

Challenge #1:

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

I appreciate the two different approaches, as I have in the other versions of the sunshine variety.

( Shall we talk about goals, then? )

Let us begin with the people who will set you up with a sign with the phrase "In our America: All people are Equal; Love Wins; Black Lives Matter; Immigrants & Refugees are Welcome; Disabilities are Respected; Women are in Charge of their Bodies; People & Planet are Valued over Profits; Diversity is Celebrated." Or stickers. Or other such expressions of the phrase.

There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.

One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.

What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.

A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.

Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.

A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.

(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)

Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.

( Still more to be seen inside, including the usual parade of US politics behaving badly )

Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.

Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Let us begin with the garderobe of the Internet, 4chan, going offline after being hacked thoroughly by a rival garderobe.

A bookstore owner in Chelsea, Michigan, got the community to come out and help move the books from an old location to the new one. The volunteers formed a human chain and passed each of the books in stock down the line from the old space to the new one. The community did the owner a solid and showed that having a community around you is one of the best things for anyone.

On the importance of a sport bra, and the things that it actually needs to do to be effective, none of which necessarily have to do with how it looks to an observer.

I fear for the slush pile of an imprint that believes that young men just can't find anything they want to read, and is so inviting a focus on young and middle-aged men's writing about being young and middle-aged men, mostly because I think it will be sorely disappointing to many who believe themselves gatekept by all the women to find out that no, really, friend, the novel is not actually that good.

Pope Francis is dead at 88 years of age, and we can only hope that his successor continues to take the Catholic Church in many of the directions he was pulling them, toward greater tolerance and more Christian behavior.

The toady currently in charge of the Institute for Museum and Library Services is now demanding information from IMLS grantees to prove they're using their funds in ways defined by the flurry of executive orders against accurate history, the diversity of people, and acknowledging that the world is set up to benefit rich white men and that other people may need structural assistance in defeating that impediment, as well as asking how they're using their funds to teach media literacy (which they don't want, either.)

( An awful lot of bad decisions by people who are also potentially pretty bad inside )

Last for tonight, A previously uncatalogued Mozart work has joined the others, and many a person lined up to hear the new single.

Porn addiction does not appear to be a thing. What does, however, appear to be a thing is that people with high religiosity (and thus a high likelihood of being told that the use of porn is badwrongevil) have worse negative self-image, and accompanying issues that come from that, from the moral conflict about using porn when you've been forbidden to.

A speech from someone who became a therapist to the autistic community because they were having trouble finding competent counselors for their own autism and the related demons that come from being neurodivergent in a conformity-enforcing world, and all the ways the process of becoming a therapist has failed them and failed other counselors by not giving them the opportunity to properly relate to the people trying to get something out of therapy.

And Mr. Oliver on Last Week Tonight about the considerable amount of bad faith and active cruelty being performed over a mostly nonexistent panic about trans women in sports.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

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