📏 Weekly Measure: 2024 W46

Hello and welcome to what I hope is the first in a weekly series of blog posts! I know I keep talking about doing more regular updates, and well, here I am, doing the thing.

Online Happenings

I set up a Bear Blog account for Daikon to post more frequently. He was unfortunately not a big fan of using Eleventy 😔 You can find his (Japanese-language) blog on gamedev at deekay.nicegear.games. (Yes, the subdomain actually works now and is no longer a clunky redirect!)

I'm also still soliciting buttons and pages for my links page! Please send me your website and 88x31 button if you've got one!

勉強会ジャム // Study Buddy Jam 2024

The 勉強会ジャム // Study Buddy Jam 2024 has started! You have until December 8th to pick up something you've never tried before, learn how it works, and make a little game with it. If you need some ideas, I've been posting different tools and assets on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Media Corner

Happy Hour

We've been kind of spotty about streaming Happy Hour regularly. I am very sorry about that, and we're gonna try to figure out a better schedule. But in any case, we did stream yesterday:

Games played:

• 🎣 WEBFISHING
• 🐟 Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish
• 🚀 CyberBlocker

#NowPlaying

Recently I've started listening to an album every day (or trying to, at least) and posting about them Mastodon and Bluesky. This week's albums:

Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory: Going thru Daikon's CD collection and looking for albums I can recognize and, lol, being teleported back to my emo high school self 😭 In case it wasn't obvious, I am, in fact, a millennial. Highlight: One Step Closer

Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade of Pale (US version, released in Japan): Melancholic, sad, and thoughtful. Really nails the mood I'm in right now. Highlight: A Whiter Shade of Pale

Superfly - 愛をこめて花束を (single) Good warm music to listen to on a cold and clammy November day. Highlight: 愛をこめて花束を

The Glenn Miller Orchestra - In The Mood: Yes I am an old fart, I like this kind of olde timey music 😭 It's just very cool to me okay. Highlight: Tuxedo Junction

The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic: This is the only New Pornographers I have on CD here in Japan. Twin Cinemas is my favorite but Mass Romantic is my first, and holds tons of nostalgic value. Highlight: The Fake Headlines

Gorillaz - Demon Days: I know almost nothing about Gorillaz except that Demon Days absolutely whips. Highlight: Feel Good Inc.

L'Arc~en~Ciel - Clicked Singles Best 13: I know this is kind of a cheat album (a "greatest hits" sort of deal instead of like, an ALBUM album) but I don't care, every single one of these have the magic power to send me hurtling back in time to when I was a very cringey いたい teenager. Highlight: flower

#AmReading

シャティと錬金術の町 (Sharty and the City of Alchemists) by 飛田 じゃぱお (Hida Japao): Daikon bought this manga for me because he thought I would like it and he was 100% correct. It's a cozy slice-of-life style series about Sharty, an alchemist apprentice who basically spends all her time nerding out over magical science experiments. I don't know if it has an English localization (probably not, there are currently only two tankobon out and it doesn't seem super major) but I highly recommend this anyway. It's on Kodansha's Comic Days app and website if you want a preview.

(Yes, I am aware that Sharty is a super unfortunate name for the main character 😭)

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas: Started this ages ago and am still slowly making my way through it. Currently on the Merlin chapter where she addresses the way fans decry media for having people of color in (for example) Medieval Britain and bemoan the "historical inaccuracy" of it all, and how confronting non-white characters in traditionally white roles creates hesitancy in the minds of viewers:

Thinking about the secondary worlds of fantasy as being analogous to dreams (although not quite dream states) provides much insight into why many people sincerely believe that characters of color are out of place in the fantastic: issues of race and difference threaten to shake us out of the waking dream that we inhabit while engaged in the fantastic. The spectacle of the Dark Other in a speculative narrative leads to the hesitation that is the Todorovian hallmark of the fantastic—hesitation that must be addressed.

The notion of a Christian Europe was quite precarious indeed throughout the Middle Ages, under continual threat from Others beyond the frontier—the Huns and Vikings during the beginning of the period, and then the Moors and the Ottoman Empire during the end of it. The discernible physical differences between Europeans and potential conquerors, as described by the chroniclers of the Crusades, give us a glimpse of the start of the racialized consciousness of the modern West.

This is why thinking about race as it exists in the secondary world of the reader’s imagination matters for understanding how the dark fantastic cycle operates in fantasy and fairy tales. The construct of dreaming-as-reading provides a way to unlock what may be going on as readers, viewers, and fans engage in the fantastic. The presence of the Dark Other amplifies the reader/viewer/fan’s sense of hesitation. It creates a spectacle that hails the monstrous. This leads to textual violence, and the Dark Other then haunts the text.

Henry Time

Your weekly dose of Henry:

That's all for now, see you next week! 👋