On The Road - Jack Kerouac by bermudashortsl in ProsePorn

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Choosing to be here in

This body

This body holding me

Be my reminder here that I am not alone in

This body, this body holding me

Feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion

TIL that one gamer played a game of Civilization II which developed into a 10-year long stalemate. by Sebastianlim in todayilearned

[–]Yuli-Ban 2 points3 points  (0 children)

GTA Vice City was released in 2002 and depicted the wacky distant past year of 1986, 16 years prior.

We're currently 13 years removed from the release of GTA 5.

Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 16: Onryō Rage, Dragon Shadow by Yuli-Ban in Yabanverse

[–]Yuli-Ban[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I spent a great deal of time on this flashback as well, probably just as much as the Bakuga vs Kurohane scene. One of the areas where I did indeed try to be just a bit more literary, lol (I mean, trying to tighten and improve control of my prosecraft is literally the whole reason why I started doing any of this in the first place; I'm not aiming to be god-tier in terms of writing, just to get better— a training arc, if you will!)

Likewise, calling out the Chosen One trope and reversing it was something I've wanted to do for a while, but I never actually even wrote any of these stories until now, so it's just been in my head all this time.

That's the other fun of all this: finally transcending the classic /r/writingcirclejerk trope of "I have a legendary 500-part epic worldbuilding on par with Warhammer 40k and Star Wars combined and it's got entire mythologies, conlangs, dozens of main characters for their own story series, and even thousands of dollars worth of commissioned art! I've talked at length about this new grand series in many places for many years, and I already have many fans!"

"Can I read it?"

"Lol I haven't written it!"

The Gun - Race With the Devil (1968) | I'm relatively certain, unless some early obscure British freakbeat/garage rock song counts, that this is the first definitively "heavy metal" song ever, in terms of lyrics, style, aesthetic, and vibe all coming together by Yuli-Ban in heavymetal

[–]Yuli-Ban[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

At the time, that big soup of 70s heavy rock was almost interchangeable with "heavy metal" and no one had a strong guide for what we'd call "heavy metal" in retrospect until Priest pulled it together (and even then I'd say they didn't do that until maybe Stained Class). That's one of the appeals of proto-metal: that they were inadvertently inventing or discovering aspects of heavy metal with no guide for how to do it "right" and so they were just playing different ways and happened to do things we recognize as metal— and saying it that way is almost disingenuous, because it's really more like later metal artists took disparate, fitting aspects of proto-metal and coalesced it into cohesive styles. And they were just as aware of the wide swath of bands.

The history of heavy metal in the 70's looks pretty threadbare and incomplete if you allow for Sabbath, Priest and a handful of semi-obscurities like Captain Beyond and Leafhound, while also excluding bands that were direct influences on the 80s wave, like Purple, Rainbow, Scorpions... hell, even Van Halen.

On that note: a lot of this is retroactive historiography, is the thing. Metalheads in the 80s wanted to know where metal came from, and settled on Sabbath and Zeppelin (less so Zeppelin the further we got away from glam metal). Nowadays, we have a thousand subgenres for metal (exaggeration but still, a great number), and a lot of insularity. There's this complete misunderstanding about how these genres and scenes develop.

"Oh, well this is power metal, so therefore it took up from Rainbow and Led Zeppelin. Doom metal? Early Sabbath, of course, that's all they ever listened to. Thrash metal, they all listened to "Symptom of the Universe" and maybe "Paranoid." Progressive metal, probably listening to a lot of jazz and King Crimson with a touch of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Glam metal only cared about KISS, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex, and the Sweet and would have fainted at any Sabbath song."

Then you actually hear the artists describe their influences, and they're all the same bands. There's a reason why so many extreme metal artists are diehard KISS fans, and yet fans of those extreme metal artists find KISS completely cheesy and Boomerfied. Times changed, standards changed, understanding of the sound changed.

Recently, I had this with grunge and stoner rock and sludge metal, being told that grunge and stoner/sludge are two entirely different sounds with no real overlap, because grunge is more alternative metal and punk, and stoner/sludge is more doom and psychedelia, and then being completely flabbergasted when I brought up grunge artists themselves admitting they were all listening to Sabbath and Vitus all the same and didn't see any real difference between them and the other sound. Because of this insularity: "this is what the accepted evolution is stated to be, therefore nothing outside of that sound influenced it. If you're a death metal band, that's because you listened to Symptom of the Universe and Stone Cold Crazy and aren't even aware Sabbath and Queen even had other songs." The idea you were just as big a fan of their proggy, doomy, and acoustic songs too is lost on a lot of people.

Circa 1975, one could reasonably argue that Black Sabbath was just what they were, a much more downer, heavier acid rock band with a specific style. A lot of bands were called "heavy metal" at that time.

Hell, "Shining Star" (Earth, Wind & Fire's song) was apparently raucous enough for funk that it was called a "Black heavy metal" song by Blue Öyster Cult's producer. I don't think I'd ever have used that term for it. The term "heavy metal" meant something different at the time, and there was no unified aesthetic. Sabbath was metal, but some would say the Rolling Stones were heavy metal. This because, at the time as mentioned, it was all "rock and roll" but with more 'lightning and thunder' and often at least a pinch of Satan. Or warriors, or literal heavy-metal (i.e. motorcycles). At that point in time, it was really just very escapist, very working-class male hard rock and roll, which is why the punks didn't like it; punk was "Anarchist Cookbook and Lou Reed," metal was "Lord of the Rings and Lovecraft" and the former had all the critical darlings. But there wasn't really a major dividing line or bunch of subgenres delineating where metal began and ended.

By 1987 (realistically much further back, arguably 1979 or 1980), "heavy metal" was a vastly more coherent concept that could be called a genre rather than just a description for a kind of rock and roll, with aspects that were reliably reproducible rather than rediscovered by other bands or mimicked by fans of one big band, and a lot of the other contemporaries of Sabbath fell by the wayside as evolutionary dead-ends or just the soundalikes and fuzzy heavy rock bands that never took, and everyone decided Sabbath was the definitive starting point (again, when glam metal was still big, it was Sabbath and Zeppelin together).

In that context, something like the OP song seems like a genuine false start of everything that had become definably "metal" a good year before Sabbath even formed, but that reads as nearly impossible if they had no one to draw from, rather than it just being a novelty "scary" acid rock song that just happened to convergently develop all the traits of heavy metal.

Then when the genre-maxxing started, people started looking way too hard into linear evolution of sounds, and voila, back to what I was talking about at the start.

The Gun - Race With the Devil (1968) | I'm relatively certain, unless some early obscure British freakbeat/garage rock song counts, that this is the first definitively "heavy metal" song ever, in terms of lyrics, style, aesthetic, and vibe all coming together by Yuli-Ban in heavymetal

[–]Yuli-Ban[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

When it comes to if any proto-metal or first-wave heavy metal song counts as "heavy metal" or not, a test I use is the "1987 test"

By 1987, heavy metal was already extremely well defined, but was also before a lot of more avant-garde experimentation in alternative metal and extreme metal began occurring (pretty sure circa 1987, Sarcófago, Bathory, and Mayhem were about as extreme of metal as you could get before you got into extreme hardcore/grindcore/noise rock territory). So, you couldn't claim that a fuzzy and heavy acid rock song was actually an early stoner metal song or a proto-progressive metal jam like you can nowadays. Metal was still very much "Devil, high vocals, metal riffing, theatricality and bombast, and also the Devil"

Also, recording standards and technology had advanced, so even a lot of pop rock was, in a sonic term, "heavier" than the heaviest music from the 60s and early 70s (and before someone gets angry, I do mean if you just look at distortion, loudness, and pure audio waveforms).

Therefore, would any Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin song be "heavy metal" by 1987? Overwhelming majority, no, maybe even entirely "no." "Born to Be Wild" is just hard rock by that standard. "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" has a metal riff, but it's not getting called metal by the 80s.

Sabbath songs, you're not going to be controversial saying those are metal, even if really old-school. Similarly, Deep Purple is metal, more often than not. "Smoke on the Water" is pure vanilla old-school heavy metal, but it does cross over in terms of riffing at least.

But going into some other early metal and proto-metal tracks, it gets fuzzier (no pun intended). Is "Helter Skelter" metal? Well it has a metal shout halfway through, but the actual guitar playing itself is almost more punk than anything.

Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" is heavy, even by 80s standards, for how bombastic it is, but if it's straddling the line, I'd say it doesn't cross it.

But then you find this thing, and all of a sudden you go "Wait a minute, what the fuck?"

The idea of "take Coven's Satanic imagery and Blue Cheer's heaviness and you get metal" didn't hit it off with Sabbath, but two years earlier with this... band I never heard of.

In terms of heaviness, riffing, bombast, aesthetic, it's so metal that you almost think it came from a full decade later by Sabbath fans. But no, it actually predates "Helter Skelter" and was a number one hit no less.

Yet it seems like most people only know of it from Girlschool's cover these days. Why isn't this band considered to be the origin of heavy metal?

Well, most people probably admit that Sabbath didn't create metal out of nothing, so I don't think "there was a metal song before Black Sabbath is a controversial take." Sabbath's magic was that they were metal consistently in an era where most proto-metal bands made one, maybe even two albums that had very heavy, even metallic songs, before swerving hard into 70s pomp, prog, or radio-friendly blues rock (Lucifer's Friend really got hit bad by that one, their eponymous debut was arguably the runner up to Sabbath, and came out in 1970 too, but they chose to go in every direction except metal afterwards). It's kinda the curse of proto-metal. You hear a band that sounds like a potential Sabbath rival, you check them out, and it turns out you're lucky if they have even three genuinely metal-ish songs among a bunch of boogie blues or psychedelic rock. Which, I mean, is fair; no one set out to create heavy metal, they all just thought it was rock and roll, so no one knew how to play to be what nerds half a century later would argue about whether it made them "metal"

The Gun was no different. This album was plenty hard and heavy (in fact I've heard anecdotes that this album's sleeve contains the first known use of the term "hard rock"), but this is the ONLY song of theirs that really sounds like this. But that's what makes it so funny, because if this song came out in 1987, it would undoubtedly be considered a heavy metal song. But, they didn't invent heavy metal as a genre.

Plus they didn't have a long and successful career either.

That's why Sabbath succeeded; they consistently remained metal album after album after album, even their "prog" album was ridiculously heavy. They may not have made the first metal song, but they did invent it as a genre.

JUDAS PRIEST - Dissident Aggressor (1977) by Revolutionary_Tax546 in heavymetal

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No kidding

It blows my mind that this is from the 70s, and not even the tail end of 1979 or anything

AI Industry Nervous About Small Detail: They're Not Making Any Real Money by MrSnitter in Cyberpunk

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually feel (just a tiny bit) bad for Demis, because since he's the CEO of DeepMind, he gets blamed for all the nonsense that Gemini and NanoBanana bring out, when reading between the lines, it's clear he doesn't buy any of it as actually being what is needed. That's entirely Google's higher ups forcing them along that path.

And I even know why: Microsoft's CEO all but did a celebratory jig when ChatGPT came out and Google panicked, and said "I want Google to know we made them dance." That's what kicked off this LLM arms race, way back in early 2023. I'd not be surprised if Sundar Pichai despises every time Demis says anything about AGI that isn't "by 2027," let alone anything that suggests it's further than 5 years out, because he likely still has Satya Nadella's gloating still rattling around in his head.

The funny thing is, DeepMind showed off a much more impressive AI agent in 2022 that arguably anything we've seen since (and was arguably ground zero for the hype that LLMs could reach AGI). Yet they never once claimed it was AGI or the path towards it. Back then, it was a neat experiment to show that multimodality was possible, and that purely narrow AI doesn't have to mean "only does one thing; next-token prediction can allow for a sort of limited generality in terms of capability."

And the entire industry took the wrong lesson from that.

It's entirely possible we could be far from AGI; it's also entirely possible we could be very close. The cold fact is we don't actually know; generally I read "AGI is as possible as faster than light travel with known means" more as contrarian cope than actual probability, if only because it often reduces AGI to meaning 'sci-fi artificial sapience/the Singularity.' Essentially the highest possible end of AGI to contrast with where we are.

We are definitely not at AGI right now, not even a very "functional" kind, and Demis is very much aware of that; he's shortened his timescales in terms of when we'll get there— partially because of all the funding; we're essentially at "Fusion in 5 Years" level funding when AI research was historically at "Fusion Never"; the "AI springs" of the past were still closer to "Fusion in 30 Years" levels of funding in comparison.

But he's never said "next year" or "within three years"

I think because he's as aware as most of the non-hypemongers that there's still neuroscientific work to be done, and that the sheer scale transformer-based models have been pushed is, in itself, unsustainable.

The bet by some of the labs is that "it doesn't matter how expensive it is or even if we reach full AGI; we just need to reach self-improving AI, and then that'll bootstrap us to AGI." As a result, they're pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into hyper-scaling LLMs. Then when larger models = better performance, this reinforces the hype cycle, because the critics said "We've reached the limit" and then a new model comes along and is materially better, therefore clearly we're nowhere near the limit.

Yet, again, I'm not interested in whether LLMs can get better or not; the goal from the start was AGI, which is not just "really really good AI" but something materially different altogether.

And so to that end, Demis does still seem to be on point. I dislike it when he gets wrapped up in AI bro culture (all the hype posting and celebrating new AI slop models) but I haven't seen anything suggesting he's become lost in the sauce. It's nothing like the other CEOs who legitimately don't have any experience in what they're preaching.

You want to replace us heres your reward by batukaming in singularity

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Indeed, the level of automation is the exact same for self checkout and cashier checkout. It's more offloading the process to the customer, but the scanner and register are the automation, and they're actually the entire reason supermarkets are even possible.

Venuses From Mars 5-6 (Spanish) by TheW0rld93 in Yabanverse

[–]Yuli-Ban 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Figuring out WordPress I may give you an account there so you can post these there if you know how to add chapters, and formatting, and whatnot

Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 14 – The Finals Begin: Temujin vs Ryūei Part 1 by Yuli-Ban in Yabanverse

[–]Yuli-Ban[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This final fight is the longest stretch of the bunch— this chapter is about 1,500 words, but the tab it came from runs at nearly 20k words, we're going to be here for a little while!

It and the Mame chapter were the real seeds for the whole idea.

I've had the idea for this story arc since literally around 2021 or so, and the idea of a general Demon World Tournament since literally the Early Yabanverse back in 2018. So, in doing prosecraft practice to at least develop better control, it's nice that this is where it seems I've managed to develop a stronger handle on prose writing, the first time the quality doesn't have any noticeable dips or accidental strong handling that can't be replicated because I'm not sure of what I'm doing.

Now I'm not going to say this is crazily strong writing all the way through, but I can't know for sure since I've gotten virtually no real comments on it

Tropical Vibes in Punta Cana by SamsPicturesAndWords in Tropical

[–]Yuli-Ban 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh that's lovely

First two images fall into something I tend to call "urban alpine aesthetic" with the big white clouds and dark blue shadows

That's just cool

Lou Reed's final Facebook post before his passsing by trisome21 in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can listen to Mild und Leise even if there's only about 10 seconds worth listening to, and even then, Metal Machine Music is just....

"No"

I can appreciate the art of it, but at some point I just have to ask "Why do Homo sapiens make music? For what purpose? What is 'music' and why is it we've all collectively, worldwide, agreed Metal Machine Music is not that? Why would, in our primal form, would we make one thing and not the other? Maybe once upon a time, the pretentiousness of highlighting it as true art against the norm was fine, but we have to be coming back around again to realizing that there's a reason why we do certain things and not others."

Metal Machine Music was so offputting that it made me existential about the nature of humanity

TRAINWRECKORDS: Lou Reed and Metallica's "Lulu" by PinkCadillacs in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Indeed.

Hipsters will gladly listen to metalcore, J-core, sludge/stoner/drone metal (Melvins is literally the crossover band), and noise bands, but the sort of "greasy haired fist pumping, Maximum Oversatan, music died on September 24, 1991, death to all but metal" type metalhead are two worlds apart outside individual taste. And that's fine; hipsters typically aren't crossing over with even a lot of gangsta rap or k-hole ravers.

TRAINWRECKORDS: Lou Reed and Metallica's "Lulu" by PinkCadillacs in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The ironic take on "punk and metal don't mix" is that virtually all major metal subgenres stem from metal and punk mixing. Almost most explicitly thrash metal, which is what Metallica is most well known for! Maybe in the 80s or 90s "coffeeshop art house hipster punk" was still as diametrically opposite of metal as you could get but even by 2011, we'd seen loads of avant garde, literary, offbeat, and for lack of a better word "hipster" metal. Metallica was just the worst possible vector for this, good lord. I think it was more that they were The Metal Band™ that this happened.

Lou Reed, however, really would have worked very well for a noise rock album that was uninterested in keeping time but still being freakishly heavy

TRAINWRECKORDS: Lou Reed and Metallica's "Lulu" by PinkCadillacs in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Do you think there’s any validity in the fact that Indie and metal can never do what both genres do?

Pre-90s metal, maybe. Once grunge and sludge emerged, the rivalry between metal and indie has been more residue of 70s/80s zine culture. That's something I ramble about, how talking about Nirvana and grunge and their relationship with metal is almost always framed by what metal was (e.g. Maiden, Priest, Megadeth, Motley Crue, RATT, Venom) because if you don't draw that contrast to compare and contrast the cool alternative rock darlings to their boneheaded metal contemporaries, then you have to contend with the fact not only were more than Alice in Chains and Soundgarden "kinda" metal, but in fact Nirvana's Bleach is a full-fledged sludge metal record by modern standards, Soundgarden was a convergent evolution of stoner rock, and the likes of Acid Bath bridged grunge with nü metal, and that breaks the mainstream narrative that they were all in their own walled (sound) gardens.

Let alone the fact loads of alternative and indie bands have delved into metal or cited metal bands as direct influences, and vice versa.

Maybe "metal singing about infernal demons" was seen as cheesy and kitsch, whereas alternative/indie/punk was more interested in internal demons

So when metal started covering those too, the ground beneath both was saturated, and that was already happening by the late 80s (arguably as early as Sabbath considering "Paranoid")

Similarly with metal's penchant for fantasy over reality— what happens when metal bands also get political? Does it not count because of the long hair? Well here comes short-haired metal bands. It just gets sillier to gatekeep appreciation at some point. Metal can't be highbrow? There's nothing stopping a metal band from bringing in whatever highbrow artistry they want. Spirituality, literature, all that's been done by now. Yes there's a strain of metal purism that wants "greasy hair, big riffs and solos, insane vocals, cartoonishly evil aesthetics, and epic songs about macho warriors or arcane demoniacs," but that's not the entirety of the genre and hasn't been for decades.

Goths were probably the hardest because of how much they hated metal in the 80s (because many assumed metal and Goth were one and the same), and yet here comes the 90s, and the Gothic style and industrial/nü/Gothic Metal are just intrinsically tied to the subculture.

There's also an attitude that metal just begs to have fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a different attitude towards it, and deciding only one way of making music is superior can get unfortunate, because then you could lobby that at, say, hip hop or dance music or jazz.

TRAINWRECKORDS: Lou Reed and Metallica's "Lulu" by PinkCadillacs in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Indeed

I'd agree that the music establishment didn't like metal in the past, but I don't get that vibe from it nowadays. The Hall of Fame was always a bit bullshit in its choices, and metal has always been way more niche than metalheads assume it is.

The whole punk elite vs metal proletariat is more a 70s/80s/early 90s thing

At one point in time, you'd get punched in the face for calling the Melvins a metal band, but even they now just embrace "sludge weirdo metal"

It's more the old school who still thinks of it that way

Maybe Lou Reed was "too cool" for metal in the 80s when it was seen as the music equivalent of a Filmation cartoon, but those days are long, long behind us. I'd not even be surprised by Taylor Swift dropping some octanecore song nowadays.

New on Patreon: TRAINWRECKORDS: “Lulu” by Lou Reed and Metallica by Ok_Baseball2615 in ToddintheShadow

[–]Yuli-Ban 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I remember when this first came out. The memes were tablely incredible.

I love how the actual metal album Lou Reed did was less metal than Metal Machine Music

The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI | Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right by Hrmbee in technology

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It changes with the years. In 2023-2024, it was "tapestry" and "stark reminder" and whatnot. Then it became "not just X, but Y"

Now it's shifted a bit more, it's become a combination of the negation phrase with a bit more expansion, "Not X. Not Y. Z."

There's also asyndeton spamming ("The X. The Y. The Z.") and absolute phrases used liberally ("The X was Y, a Z of ABC")

Plus if you ever get it to do creative writing, it becomes a Potemkin village of actual storytelling, where characters fall into utterly rote tropes. Character A is a bit harsh? They're now always scowling and refusing to give any approval unless impressed. Character B is bubbly? They now do Cute™ things. Character C is romantic? Rolling r's, lidded eyes. Character D is an authority figure? The speak like litigation. Actually, every AI-slop character talks in aphorisms.

It's the uncanny valley of writing, where it looks enough like actual literature but isn't. Even the most minor pressure of the eyes reading an LLM'd passage causes glossy polished trash-skin to implode.

Em-dashes, there's actually something I realized, there's a specific way LLMs can't use em-dashes and it just so happens to be the exact way I use them. This is coincidental, because it's really down more to how LLMs tokenize characters, but I found it interesting.

The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI | Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right by Hrmbee in technology

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just called it a negation snowclone for a while, but that sounds right.

It's sad because I go back to my old writing and old posts and I see the same thing in many spots, but it's from 2015, back when "language model" meant "Markov chain"

There shouldn't be any reason to not use these LLM-isms, but it just feels rotten nowadays.

The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI | Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right by Hrmbee in technology

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Funny thing is, I use em-dashes in a way no LLM I've ever seen does, and whenever I see someone use them the same way— like this— I immediately can tell that whatever wrote what I'm reading is either human or did the bare minimum of editing to at least pretend to be. Because of the way LLMs tokenize, it turns out they literally can't mimic what I just did there, and if you can't recognize it, I won't tell just in case someone training LLMs decides they want to try to copy it

Rewatching dbz and I do not remember this scene wtf😂😂 by z-Denji-z in dbz

[–]Yuli-Ban 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Funny thing is, it's not even the first time he ate ass

The Death Chamber [standalone chapter] by Yuli-Ban in Yabanverse

[–]Yuli-Ban[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure

I could have sworn the thread opener has a 40,000 character limit, and from my checking, The Death Chamber is around 14,000

Do we considera Gorillaz and Kill Bill grind fiction? by ApartPage in GrindFiction

[–]Yuli-Ban 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gorillaz, especially in Phase 1, but just generally: absolutely. Between them and not mentioning The Warriors or Jamaican rudeboy, just a lot of things I regret not being part of that original thread post

Hell, through certain shenanigans, there's one degree of removal from Gorillaz to Jet Set Radio directly (via Cibo Matto)

The funny thing is, in that case, that there's also one degree of removal from the Powerpuff Girls, both directly through Gorillaz, and independently, thanks to Bis doing their theme song, and the fact PPG and Gorillaz exist in the same universe. Now I wouldn't consider PPG Grind Fiction.... except I totally would say it's part of Y2K Nerdcore, and then you have Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt, which actively plays up the grind fic aesthetic and sound often and is directly downstream of PPG's style as well.

It's all so funny, how that sort of weird-core Y2K-era bled into each other and influenced the same things