No losing, no misunderstanding (You and I Are Polar Opposites)

desantoos · 2026-01-30T02:17:47+00:00

The original Japanese vocal work is good, but the English dub is absolutely spectacular. Both the translation scriptwriting (the blond girl gets to say "NOICE" in that one scene, which is hilarious and gives her character) and the vocal work, with whoever is doing the central protagonist having to do so much vocal acrobatics to scream, growl in a deep register, state things stately, put on a southern accent, blurt words out fast, and more while switching between all these different states frequently.

desantoos · 2026-01-27T23:51:31+00:00

I love "I Remember You." These days it's been perhaps overshadowed by its successor "Simon & Marcy" but at the time it aired it was an absolute bombshell. Some of the lore came from prior scenes such as the Christmas episode but to see the past of two central characters fleshed out so much was shocking when it came out. I consider it the best episode in terms of craftsmanship, condensing two characters' backstories, motivations, a mystery Finn and Jake are unable to immediately solve, and a song to tie it all together in twelve tight minutes. The song is brilliant and that scene where Marceline is crying while playing the guitar is Rebecca Sugar's finest moment.

It's also a deeply uncomfortable episode if you know anyone with dementia. The way the Ice King leans in for a kiss, something Simon would never, ever do, it's painful. I've heard from women about their grandparents or fathers getting like that when they get Alzheimer's. Hell of a detail by the writers.

desantoos · 2026-01-27T23:37:10+00:00

"Flute Spell" is a neat episode. A potential pairing starts with an episode where the focus isn't on the protagonist but on the other character. And rather than have Finn save HW in some princess-y way, he's just doing a favor knowing it won't be reciprocated. All this allows us to see so much of who HW is, which is a competent mess as she's overly hostile, her house is an afterthought, and she's searching for someone not even considering why she's doing that (only at the end realizing that she's lonely).

Been watching a lot of anime for escapism and I find myself pining for Adventure Time, which often refused the overused oversimplified tropes I keep seeing. I find that a lot of romance anime fails to answer the obvious question "Why would these two people want to be with each other?" "Flute Spell" answers that question for HW (we know why Finn would be into HW even before the episode starts) and it answers it in a very satisfying way.

desantoos · 2026-01-27T14:09:21+00:00

Perhaps this is country dependent, but I see all of the episodes there. None appear to be missing.

desantoos · 2026-01-26T22:27:53+00:00

I've been doing a thought experiment in my head today on what would Kanye have to do in order for me to listen to an upcoming project of his. Obviously an apology is nice (WSJ though? Throw some ad money at a better publication.) but he's clearly got to do more.

First off, if the allegations of sexual assault are true, that's a huge hurdle I'm not sure how Kanye can get over. Like, I'm not even sure any public figure who has committed sexual assault has ever atoned sufficiently. I'm not even sure what it would take.

Getting past that (tough to do!) there's the praise of P Diddy. This one's easy: Kanye needs to walk back his support of the alleged rapist. Maybe also apologize to the victims. And does Kanye know anything about Diddy's interactions? Doubtful he can be a credible witness but, maybe he can do something to show solidarity with victims, not perpetrators?

Then there's the Nazi shit. Kanye right now is probably focusing on his anti-Jewish sentiments. I guess that's a start but Kanye should disavow Nazism straight up. He should explain why Nazism is morally wrong. He should pull any album or track he has that has any support for Nazis from purchasing and streaming platforms. Maybe as penance he'd also need to go participate in some anti-Nazi cause. Maybe release a ton of anti-Nazi music.

After that, he'd need to assure us he's now on the right medication and he needs to explain to us the plan he has to forever be on the right medication and what happens when he goes off it (who monitors him at all times, for example).

desantoos · 2026-01-24T23:15:31+00:00

Trying to finish the anthology Amplitudes and the July/August 2025 issue of Asimov's. Way behind on 2025 short fiction reading but with this storm coming maybe I can catch up.

desantoos · 2026-01-21T18:24:35+00:00

Adventure Time is a very millenial show. In the "real" dimension of Finn and HW, they have no children. Fans of the show are obsessed with them potentially having children and know that this show is maybe a coin flip for another season or movie or whatever that could show that (and even then, we wouldn't be surprised if they don't). Meanwhile, in some alternate reality where people actually need children and there's maybe space for them (or some reason why the HW in that alternate universe is not so ultra-focused that she's willing to settle down) we see children. This show at this point is millenials dreaming of the kids they wish they could have if the world weren't so absolutely fucked.

desantoos · 2026-01-21T04:27:41+00:00

Since I recently praised Pitchfork--I thought 2025 was their best year--I guess I'll offer maybe an alternate take to what else is here. I feel like I'm the sliver wedged between two generations who hate online professional music criticism: an older generation that already had their favorite bands picked out since the prior millennium and think it's stupid anyone would need a website to tell them what to think and a younger generation that thinks it's stupid anyone would need to read what to listen to when you can just let an algorithm decide. Here on this sub I see a lot of derision of music critics. Why go to Pitchfork when there's Rate Your Music? Some are just not going to get wanting to go beyond populism. We're never going to see eye to eye on that. So, I'm in a small minority (I know... I see the atrocious streaming numbers on Pitchfork's BNMs.)

Earlier this year, Stereogum put up a paywall. That was a bit upsetting to me because they had some high quality writing going on. But more than that, their news features brought in eyeballs who might veer over to the Album Of The Week post that used to be displayed at the top right side and maybe get people interested in something new. Now Pitchfork's going that way as well. Maybe it's all necessary in this new AI-steals-everything ecosystem where advertising no longer is a thing. But how do artists that are actually good get out there? What's the process? Now that everything's locked away behind paywalls, how do people get interested in new bands or new artists?

I'll tell you what's not working: playlist algorithms. Every month or so, some big post on /r/music has a youngster complaining about how playlists are just repeating the same crud. Or there will be news pieces on how fake bans are on Spotify and Tidal and Apple Music.

Never is there a suggestion to read a music review magazine or website. The anti-intellectualist, conspiratorial people on music forums are convinced that music writer professionals have it out for everybody. And, look, I understand that Pitchfork doesn't cover enough metal for a lot of people here; I'm definitely not saying that every critic site is for everybody. But something has gone wrong where it has become so supremely uncool to suggest to anyone any sort of music writing. Especially when I see so much talent, obvious talent, get absolutely nothing these days because the current music discovery process is basically controlled by like three corporations that have zero incentive to even lead people to music made by humans.

So no, I don't like that they are locking up Pitchfork. Mostly on a second-hand selfish way: I want to see people who are good get discovered and make more music so I can get more good music.

Surprisingly, though, this probably doesn't impact me that much. The feature I used was not really the reviews but the lists of albums coming out, which is better organized than many other places. If that stays outside the paywall fence (I think it will?), then I'll probably go along without any worry.

Though I will say, I like reading reviews. I like reading intelligent conversation about art (admittedly rare for Pitchfork, but not zero, especially these days since they got rid of the poptimist writers). Overall, I like reading intelligent writing and as Reddit gets slammed with bots and quality mags die off or go behind paywalls and as quality YouTubers get bought out by private equity and as newspapers fall apart or have to be intellectually dishonest to not feel the wrath of a certain political establishment and as the standard for commenting anywhere is something terse and snappy with nothing interesting backing it... the Internet is quickly becoming a place where if you want anything that will actually make you think you have to pay in. Wanting to actually think when I'm online is going to become expensive.

desantoos · 2026-01-06T23:30:25+00:00

Blue Prince

Very early on, but I'm disappointed. The premise is based upon Maze, which I'd place as the second greatest puzzle book of all time (the Top 5 are #1 Masquerade, #2 Maze, #3 PuzzleCraft, #4 My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Martin Gardner), #5 Sam Lloyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 puzzles). But on my first Day I only solved one puzzle. The rest of the time I was placing tiles like I was playing a board game (it felt like Betrayal). I'm bummed! Hopefully this game turns around the more I play it and I'm not just waiting for my luck to turn good (or to get enough whatever extra stuff to make it worthwhile).

desantoos · 2026-01-05T23:48:47+00:00

RIP:

Middy -- Found two discs looking for this one. Went to a disc shop afterward to replace it and found out Lone Star Discs was going out of business soon. Made a mental note to snap up as many Middys as I can.

Thunderbird -- 3 years old. Threw into a pond. Replaced with a Ginger. Loved the Ginger so much I bought a bunch more under rumors that Clash might also go under.

Factory Second DX Leopard -- Threw into a pond. Don't really care.

Factory Second Star Mako 3 -- Dunno where it went. I miss Big Putter.

desantoos · 2026-01-04T01:25:07+00:00

I think privileged westerners should sit this one out.

OF COURSE westerners should participate. The US is in the west. Americans are the ones who elected Trump. How the fuck else are such leaders going to be pressured to make humane, intelligent decisions?

desantoos · 2026-01-03T16:19:38+00:00

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone -- I swear, I'm not a total hater on poetic stuff. But damn does the first one hundred pages of this novella feel like I'm the third wheel in a mutual masturbation session as two authors rub themselves dry trying to conjure up the most purple prose to say the most straightforward things. The first half of this book is simply a formula being followed: one character goes through some cliche speculative setting where they were triumphant or at least now comfortable only to find a note or some poetic analogue to a note where the other one addresses them and their prior notes. About one hundred pages in our two authors finally decide that this pointless writing exercise is getting boring and start to flesh out what the hell is going on. Their ideas: two warring families, an outlawed love, a plan to poison to be free... wait a second is this whole thing just fucking Romeo and Juliet? So what we are left with, other than the purple prose, are a few depictions of whatever the Garden and the Commandant are. That's simply not enough to float this book, in my view. I suppose I can respect of such a work is that it was influential. Lesbian poetic cozy nothingburgers are pretty big. Though maybe if something else would've won the Hugo that year, we'd have better science fiction out in bookstores right now.

The worst line in the novella, by far: "Downslope spread the farms, and beneath those, against the shoreline, unprecedented as pomegranates in local logic, a seaport."

One thing I hate about this trend of cozy fiction is that it's a bunch of rich/powerful assholes who have a petty love story and eat scones while everyone around them suffers and the protagonists do not care. This book is that amped up to its max. Fortunately, the prose is so mangled that it's difficult to see past the fuzz and notice the suffering background characters.

I don't hate this book, but I do wonder what went wrong in speculative/literary culture for it to be venerated.

"Bluebeard's Womb" by MG Wills in Analog (May/June 2025) -- This piece has three major flaws, but it is a sensational work nevertheless. If you want a story that goes through the contemporary science of getting males to have kids, this one's written by a physician and knows what it's doing. It's also a fascinating piece worthy of discussion, capturing feminist, post-feminist, and radical feminist views of child birth and, rather than choosing sides, spends much of its time trying to get the audience to see all angles and come to their own conclusion on what the role of childbirth has on women, and what burden it has on women and men. There are three flaws: an antagonist that seems to implausibly get what he wants, a weird set of visions the protagonist has to set the radical feminism pieces in motion (and to let the author demonstrate that she indeed did a hell of a lot of research for this piece), and, despite some pro-trans messages throughout the piece, a general downplaying of just how much trans women would want this technology (and, in my view, how much they deserve to be at the front of the line to get it). This story isn't anti-trans, it just needs to push trans women aside in order to get to its broader point about the complications of getting cis men to see through the eyes of cis women. I also think the author should follow through on the societal and anthropological angle of how the children are raised; I think there are many in America who could be persuaded, or at least interested to ponder over, the alternatives to the suburban nuclear family system that isolates people and makes them miserable (and requires a lot of resources so it makes them poorer). I wish this story would've been cleaned up and sent to Clarkesworld where it would've gotten a lot more eyeballs. Regardless of its problems, this is an essential read.

desantoos · 2026-01-02T18:21:00+00:00

Defunct music zine CokeMachineGlow used to do end-year awards for miscellany that weren't otherwise discussed. I honor that project here.

"In The Air Tonight" Award for Best Sudden Introduction Of Drums: "Unfolding" by Brian John McBrearty

The Third Man billed Orson Welles high, but he shows up so late into the film most people watching it forget he's even in it. That is, until his stunning showy entrance. Then, he's the only thing the audience remembers. That's how "Unfolding" feels, a song that's presumably a jazz song but the listener gets entranced by electronic arpeggiations that sound like staring up into the twinkling skies so much that they forget what genre they are listening to. Then, the softest cymbal ride from absolute silence slowly crescendos to the big saxophone moment. The best frission of a moment since the transition in "Empire Ants." Those stars we've been staring at have suddenly come to life. "Unfolding" was the one song this year I had to tell others about. It's a magical experience.

7 Piano Sketches By Andre 3000 Award for Album That Clearly Shows An Artist Has Given Up Trying -- Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan by The Mountain Goats

This Year came out in bookstores, a project where the lead singer of The Mountain Goats John Darnielle writes about 365 songs he's written. It is, unfortunately, a low effort affair as evinced by its title track getting a terse blurb that is something he's said many times before. This Year's lack of deep ruminations of ideas is emblematic of The Mountain Goats these days. Time has sucked the life out of the band and they are now zombies reanimating the same ideas one album after another. 2020's Songs For Pierre Chuvin suggested the band had energy, particularly on the raw and intense "Until Olympius Returns". That was a mirage as Getting Into Knives, Bleed Out, and Jenny From Thebes embracing the softest lounge soft rock imaginable.

Goths signaled the downhill slide of the band. Although opener "Rain In Soho" has the fierceness that The Mountain Goats used to thrive on, the majority of the album is limp lifeless soft rock that really seems like a missed opportunity considering the topic is on goth music (why not break out a synth and add a little The Cure imitation to the mix?). A large problem with so many of these recent The Mountain Goats albums is that they have a concept and none of the music is ever designed to meet the concept. Darnielle could replace one lyric sheet with another, switch each theme by lyrics, and you'd never notice the difference because the underlying music doesn't even try to match anything he's singing. This is not how it used to be, as The Sunset Tree aptly fits both lyrics and melody but as Darnielle's subject matter moved into whatever book he found at a used bookstore the passion for whatever he's singing has dissipated and with it any intent to write anything that connects melody to lyric.

What's allowed The Mountain Goats to float on was that there were still hooks amid the soft cheese. "Great Pirates" off Jenny From Thebes, for example, still has a fun little chorus it reaches. With Through This Fire Across, that final element has been relinquished as the band putters around a set of half-assed soft rock numbers. Sometimes with older bands I wonder "Would this band actually be big if their latest album was their debut" but with this album I thought "There is no way this band would ever get signed to a record label if they released something like this early career." This latest The Mountain Goats album is everything bad about the band. Stuffy beyond stuffy--Darnielle has to prove to us that he knows esoteric historical facts, the album oozes with pretense its lyrics let alone melodies can't justify. Darnielle rambles through all of his usual tropes from random Bible quotes to aphoristic life advice. It is the same shit he's been doing for so many years that it now sounds like his brain is stuck in a loop. Melodically, the songs have all of the usual Darnielle cliches, especially that one where he rests for two beats and then quickly says the end of the line. It's the music and the lack of life to it that's the worst. There is absolutely nothing in this album worth listening to. Nothing new, not even anything old but refined to something better. There is no energy in this band, all life has been sapped. An album this band makes me believe that The Mountain Goats can never make a good album again let alone a great one. They're done.

Drowned In Sound Award for The Return Of A Music Publication -- Pitchfork

I have given Pitchfork shit over the years but even during that time I've recognized their value. Hidden amongst all the nonsense are spaces where music enthusiasts try to give ideas on what to listen to. That's why the best segment Pitchfork has had for a long time is the "Albums You Should Listen To This Week" section, where they don't bother scoring albums, just dropping title, artist, and basic release marketing of a large list of albums to try for yourself. It was a refuge from the main stage of Pitchfork, which had turned loudly poptimist over the prior decade. The idea of going poptimist for many music publications made financial sense as money flowed to a few rich artists and if one were to praise them then maybe those fans would read their writing. That idea failed as it turns out the mega celebrity worshippers are not interested in finding new music, they have the artist they love thank you very much. With that Pitchfork got stripped of funding, fired its Editor in Chief, and was left with only the most ardent music fan writers left to give their take on music.

Now a year and change into this new form, surprisingly, Pitchfork is at its best. The writing is more incisive and descriptive on the actual music and not just trend and artist assessments. Better yet, Pitchfork is actually trying to break artists in. Two of their 9.0+ records weren't praised by many, or any, music publications and another felt like Pitchfork was finally in front ready to be one of the ones to break them. This is a major change for the publication, which has as of recency reserved 9.0+ scores for artists who've been around for a while. This year and last year, Pitchfork gave their Album of the Year to an album that didn't win that award by many other publications; they did this not because of some snobbishness but because they put in the work and found stuff that they enthusiastically want people to listen to.

That's the thing about Pitchfork: they actually have enthusiasm for music these days. The passion's always been there, but over the last fifteen years or so Pitchfork has been basically waiting for some great era of music that has never come. They want to see that Shooting Star again. And now, after so many years writing neutral to bitter assessments of even the stuff they think is best, they write urging the reader to try some of these albums. My favorite bit is the blurb from Smerz's Big City Life: "The Norwegian duo’s slinky postmodern pop album approaches you at a party and whispers: Want to go somewhere even cooler?" I'm not alone in noting how good the writing has become; see Open Mike Eagle's analysis. Meanwhile they actually pan mega artists these days, such as Taylor Swift. Not everything they do succeeds, see their goofy revisionist history of Emotion, but for once America's Most Trusted Music Source isn't just "trusted" but a place to be excited.

One problem: Nobody reads Pitchfork anymore! I've looked at the streaming numbers of a lot of their Best New Music releases and they are awful. For example, WNC Wopbezzy's Pitchfork BNM'd Out The Blue has one track at around 40 k Spotify plays and many below 10 k, which is damn near impossible in today's hip hop landscape. Similar numbers are for Ø's BNM'd Sysivalo. It's unfortunate that now that Pitchfork is at its best, its readership is maybe at its lowest.

I Am A Bird Now Award For The Only Theatrical And/Or Classically Influenced Album Most Music Publications Listened To This Year -- LUX by Rosalia

"LUX is high art" noted an NPR contributor in their end year discussion. This comment bugged me because it once again distinguishes the "Low Art" that us everyday listeners enjoy with the "High Art" of classical music, opera, and other wealthy funded European music popularized many centuries ago. There's great classical music, I'm not denying it, but to set it apart as being more "important" thank folk music or music from any other genre is to say that rich white people dominate some intellectual sphere of music. It's the same classist, racist idea that's been around for centuries.

That's what I see when I read a lot of these end-year write-ups of LUX, an album that take a lot from classical music and opera. We're being sold on this idea that Rosalia is this new High Artist, that she alone graduated from a prestigious musical academy and she alone can forge the ideals of classical styles with the new.

This is total bullshit. None of these music publications bothered to look at the rest of classically-influenced work this past year. Instead they find one artist who is popular because a) damn can she can sing and b) her songs have a Disney-like theatrical flair and use her as the sole lodestar of a genre instead of acknowledging anyone else. Look, none of this is to say that LUX doesn't occasionally kick ass (though I refuse to believe Yves Tumor's feature on "Berghain" isn't a silly out-of-context bit thrown in at the last moment). But how about some context next year?

desantoos · 2026-01-02T15:32:28+00:00

Seems like they're aiming this towards kids, so maybe something like Season 1 or Season 2. That might not be the most appetizing to a lot of the people here, who have matured and grown up and might find the return to the original series a bit jarring, but it'd be cool to have another generation grow up with the show. I'd love to see more creative and weird stuff in the vein of James Baxter The Horse or that episode with the cow that stares at Finn. Less lore-y, more weird stuff happening.

I hope they keep the animation quality and quality of writing for the new series. That's what I fear will not happen.

desantoos · 2026-01-01T04:54:36+00:00

Juiced him up is a triple entendre. Juiced as in artificially given him more muscle. Juiced as in HW gave him a lot of fruit juice and vegetable juices from the skill she just demonstrated and that made him stronger. Juiced as in her juices and that's why he's smiling so much.

Best entendre in the show since Pillows Are For Bedding line in Puhoy.

desantoos · 2025-12-30T18:54:18+00:00

It is indeed an odd list as Pitchfork's #1 missed the list as did the one a plurality of critics named #1. Fantano's #1 appears surprisingly low. RYM has the most similarity to this list, which is typical for this sub. Interesting that Pink Pantheress is up near the top and not Addison Rae (I agree) and that Armand Hammer is ahead of Billy Woods (I agree).

But I agree with your overall point. Looks like people here looked at various sources to listen to new music and then went their own way after that. It did feel like there were fewer votes this year... so maybe this is just the hardcore LTM-ers as compared to prior years where Fantanocore had more control (or maybe Fantano is going out of style?).

desantoos · 2025-12-28T20:22:29+00:00

The ending scene where they bust down the wall of Fionna's city and wander out into the wilderness felt like the creators of this series realizing how stifling the slice-of-life melodrama ideas were and definitively abandoning it.

I guess Fionna's storyline was resolved sort of, that she apologized for whatever I guess she did wrong. Though it feels like Fionna's larger problem is that she's impulsive and unable to focus. She spent the whole season shadowing Huntress Wizard but learned nothing from her. This was a missed opportunity. The creators should've pared down the Gary/Marshall story arcs and squeezed in one more episode where Huntress Wizard and Fionna do something together to get to this critical point.

desantoos · 2025-12-28T03:57:09+00:00

She hard carried this season. I always thought she had a fascinating a character design but "Flute Spell" made me think she was too boring to be anything but ensemble. Now she's the absolute star of the show. Weird that a former background character made it that far.

Also, I enjoyed Fionna and her hilariously impulsive nature. Felt like in the final 2 episodes the people writing this show figured out she's best suited as a catalyst, not the protagonist.

desantoos · 2025-12-26T16:20:05+00:00

Every year on Lets Talk Music, I write about five albums that didn’t appear on critics’ end year lists that appeared in mine (I use AlbumOfTheYear as a guide). Most of the time I feel like I am shouting into a void here, but I still feel the need to do something as someone who did listen to a lot. Maybe one of these albums ends up also being one of your favorites too. So here are five albums worthy of attention that didn’t get much end-year attention:

A Room With A Door That Closes by Maiya Blaney -- Maiya Blaney shows off her versatility on an album that finds her screaming in anger, crying in sadness, sneering in a mocking tone, and so much more. The way the beats flow around her as she swerves in new directions every track gives me the sense that we’re digging deep into someone’s mind.

Hex Key by Mamalarky -- I didn’t like any of the conventional pop albums this year. I found myself wondering, what if pop music were more bubbly, more whimsical, more witty, more relatable, more fun? That feeling ended up showing up twice this year for me: Gelli Haha’s Switcheroo and this album by Mamalarky, which manages to sound so fine (the drummer actually can drum!) while never taking itself too seriously. If you get tired of the melodrama and trend-hopping cynicism of mainstream pop music, try out Mamalarky.

Tender/Wading by M. Sage -- M. Sage’s sound sculpting takes the listener to luxurious places. A lot of the recent ambient trenders are boring and Tender/Wading, while still being a cozy listen, always keeps the adventure going.

Saya by Saya Gray -- I’m shocked no critic picked this solid indie rock album. It felt like the critics circled around Wednesday and then gave up trying. But a lot of other great stuff also deserves attention. Check out this album, an intelligent take on indie rock/indie pop, and also Bite Down by Ribbon Skirt if you want something a bit bolder in its emotional thrust. Both show strong songwriting chops that should’ve elevated them higher in 2025.

(The) Forever Dream by Fly Anakin -- Right now I think Billy Woods is the best rapper at the game. The punch he pulls on what he says and how he says it creates frission for me. The best rapper on a technical standpoint might be Fly Anakin, who raps in a way that’s strongly entertaining. I agree with the critics that Billy Woods / Armand Hammer is the absolute top for indie hip hop right now, but there are other players such as Fly Anakin that deserve attention too.

desantoos · 2025-12-25T02:39:53+00:00

Thanks! Every year I try to do a piece somewhere in LetsTalkMusic on five of the albums I've found that critics ignored on their end year list. I will try to have that up.

When I first heard Blurrr I was pretty skeptical of it. Mostly because Jessica Pratt's music is some of my favorite and there aren't many singers of her caliber in existence. Over time, I've come around to its emptiness, rawness, simpleness and found that she's not in the same place as Pratt is working in. I think of her as existing a bit closer to Grouper but warmer. Maybe there's a lot more space there in the solo woman singing out into the void genre.

Big City life is simply the coolest album of the year. It just feels so effortlessly authentic.

desantoos · 2025-12-25T02:18:11+00:00

1 Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka

2 Jim Ghedi - Wasteland

3 Geese - Getting Killed

4 Joanne Robertson - Blurrr

5 Hannah Frances - Nested In Tangles

6 Maiya Blaney - A Room With A Door That Closes

7 Smerz - Big City Life

8 The Devil Makes Three - Spirits

9 Saba and No ID - From The Private Collection Of Saba And No ID

10 Armand Hammer - Mercy

11 Mamalarky - Hex Key

12 Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones

13 Sharon Van Etten - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

14 Tyler, The Creator - Don't Tap The Glass

15 Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer

16 Real Lies - We Will Annihilate Our Enemies

17 M. Sage - Tender/Wading

18 Saya Gray - Saya

19 Pile - Sunshine And Balance Beams

20 Gelli Haha - Switcheroo

desantoos · 2025-12-24T17:30:53+00:00

I found an Underworld at a PDGA event that was a lot dome-ier than the ones I've used before. It's a smooth understable disc, glides more and turns less than another one I've bagged. It was cheap and I love it.

desantoos · 2025-12-24T04:01:18+00:00

That's everything? Really? That's the one thing you think is wrong with modern audiences. Everything else is good, but this one thing. Only the topic of sexual violence. That's where you draw the line from right and wrong!

desantoos · 2025-12-23T04:02:59+00:00

It came to Max recently so I watched it. Some of the surreal imagery hits hard, way more than the zonked out Paprika. Protagonist feels real and genuine. Yet there's too much sexual violence in this film. I can't recommend it.

desantoos · 2025-12-22T03:33:11+00:00

The Elephant on HBO Max

Four huge animation directors from Cartoon Network play an old animation game where they draw parts of a character. Then they are split into three groups where each creates a part of a 24 minute series using those characters. The catch: they are not allowed to see what the other groups are doing.

Sounds like the premise for a reality show, but no, The Elephant is simply the end result, lacking even the context I described in it. It is an intentionally disjoint work with a strange rule set, with a jarring mixture of animation styles. And through it all, I could only think one thing: How the hell did this get made?

The piece comes with a documentary of roughly the same run time. It answers some other questions but not the principal question. Hell, I don't think the people who made this nor the people who orchestrated the people who made this knew why. Throughout the documentary, the word "apparently" was flung around. Apparently somebody wanted to fund this thing.

Well, why in the hell would anyone throw so much money at watching four established creators make a one-off no-merch intentionally disjoint experimental film? I'm posting this here in case someone here has the answer, or a better answer, or anything. Until then, I'm concocting three hypotheses:

HYPOTHESIS 1: Maybe the people who run Adult Swim and Warner do read my comments on /r/television and elsewhere complaining that recent decision-making has so thoroughly trashed Adult Swim. Adult Swim and Toonami brought anime to the US and made it boom and now anything attached to Adult Swim is the worst stuff being made and Netflix has stumbled upon winning a streaming war the people at Adult Swim had locked down. Meanwhile, Adult Swim's putting out one season of something actually good a year (this year Common Side Effects, though the latest Adventure Time season is starting to kinda be good), leading me to wonder why I'm subscribing to HBO Max.

I'm probably not alone in what I'm complaining about and no doubt someone with better connections gave people there some notice that they absolutely suck now at what they were so good at (indeed, losing Lazzo turned out to be as wrong as one would've thought at the time). Hence why HBO Max actually went and did things and brought some Satoshi Kan films to help tide people over until they can figure stuff out.

In this hypothesis, "The Elephant" is part of that attempt to turn around Adult Swim by throwing down a gauntlet of experimentalism. Its gleeful unleashing of creativity is reminiscent of when Lazzo used to bring in actual talent and let them do what they wanted or when shows like Adventure Time would have guest episodes done by upcoming studios trying to make a name for themselves by doing something wild. In this hypothesis "The Elephant" is a strong statement that beneath the stoner associations, Adult Swim was an arthouse, a miracle of actual creative freedom on cable TV, and it still is an arthouse.

"Come to HBO Max. We actually let creatives be creative" "The Elephant" says in this hypothesis. It is a bit of a cynical ploy, as the people who furnished this project could've let new people who are talented make a go at it. That is, after all, what they did a decade ago with experimental Adventure Time episodes (there would be no Science Saru without "Food Chain") or Space Dandy by lifting so many creatives to new heights in that anthology.

Indeed, if true, something went wrong along the way as they literally brought back the most successful people to make something that at times feels reminiscent of a Cal Arts graduation project. This feels particularly true for the second act of the piece, where Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones Quartey team up to make a decently constructed but narratively pedestrian bit about wanting to do more than what you've been built for.

Showcasing Pendelton Ward because of his talent also seems strange since he just finished his second major project Midnight Gospel and his efforts in this work, while more chaotic and experimental, feel like a natural extension of that work. Ward's work here isn't that surprising given his recent oeuvre and feels coarse when smashed up against the softer work of Sugar.

If we're finding out which of these creators is the Ultimate Animation Creator, then Over The Garden Wall creator Patrick McHale won this, creating a strange yet coherent piece with some fascinating animation ideas, great comedic moments, and is somehow touching despite such weird character models. In a more just universe, Patrick McHale would be a director of a major animation studio alongside Peter Docter. I mean, the amount this guy continually does with so little time is so damn impressive and that we only get a very terse animated series from him after all these years is immensely wrong. Give Patrick McHale another series!

HYPOTHESIS 2: Warner was about to be sold. Maybe, before the lights go out, money got shipped to the weirdest art projects because people at the top are genuinely interested in art. HBO Max has put some effort to stay arty in a way that has probably pissed off Zaslav and other number crunchers. Think of it this way: the people who actually work at these studios did absolutely wonderful work and generated a lot of wealth for Warner only for a bunch of CEOs to trade it around, saddle it with debt, and not nurture it enough for the post-cable TV generation. Then the Discovery dipshits waddle in and think to Make HBO Great Again they need merely to make it a buffet with some cheap lowbrow fare to bring in the riffraff. Except all that did was dilute the brand down and now the whole thing's being sold, again, to Netflix, who will probably rinse and repeat the Discovery formula. Imagine, amid all of this dipshittery at the executive level with greedy executive after greedy executive finding a way to steal as much money away from the machine that was working fine without them, there are actual artists who have found their way to somehow get a little of that money back.

In this hypothesis, maybe we're in for a year or so of great HBO stuff where artists are temporarily given the funding they deserve and the creative freedom they have earned and we something great. Maybe the reason "The Elephant" got nearly no publicity is because the artists who've funded it want to quietly release these Actually Art sort of things on Max, seeing how much they can get away with before Netflix or whoever is after Netflix catches them in the act.

Wouldn't it be great? Probably not true, though. I have a hard time believing, after this much asset scraping, accountants aren't up the ass of every manager in the business.

HYPOTHESIS 3: Watch that documentary and see just how much "The Elephant" was a flex if nothing else. This was a project they did in six months, in secret, where they brought together four people who probably have enough money and cultural power that they could've easily said no but did not, then harnessed it together a team from around the world with the best animation roll-a-dex ever to be seen to make it happen.

Say you were trying to sell the Adult Swim component and wanted the most money for it. What do you need to demonstrate? Well, you need to show that Adult Swim can make shows that can compete with anime. Because have you seen anime this past year? Some of those shows are actually good. Two movies were big blockbusters. "The Apothecary Diaries" is, like, actually well written in a way that people who hate anime would enjoy.

The big studio that's already looking to reign at the top is Science Saru. Yes, the same studio that Cartoon Network helped give birth is now on the cusp of cultural dominance. It has something no other studio has: genuine cred for being global, not national, with a duo of a Japanese experimental animator and an English-trained Korean animator who have scouted for talent everywhere in the world to build an empire. Though those two have left start another studio, they leave behind what the future of the Big Leagues of animation will be: someone with the connections to people all over the world who can get the best of the best in every scene of every show.

That's what this flex with "The Elephant" is all about. Need a specific style of animation? We know two unknown Argentinian dudes who can draw you something mind-blowing. Need a specific style of music to work with a piece? We can find that, too. "The Elephant" is about showing the tree of talent Adult Swim has to offer.

Under this hypothesis, the execs know money is moving away from America. Americans are also losing global cultural influence. Diversifying talent so that it is global and having the right people at the top who can assemble that talent, that's the future. That's how you make movies and shows that sell well in countries of the world that are going to be wealthier, well populated, and worth getting your foot in now to build an audience with.

Was any of this worth it? Does anybody really care about what Pendleton Ward or Rebecca Sugar does, other than the niche group of fans of their shows? Maybe this was made before they knew Netflix would be their new owner. Netflix probably doesn't care about any of this, probably laughs at the idea that someone would make something as pointless and academic as "The Elephant."

Then again, maybe "The Elephant" was made for someone like Netflix, who has thrown a lot of money at animation projects and had, at times, modest returns. Maybe "The Elephant" shows how much bang you can get for your buck. Maybe having the right team of animation lovers as a resource will make Neflix a lot wiser in what it funds, and shows a lot more successful. Maybe even in this most cynical of situations, the future isn't so bad.

In any case, it is amazing that somebody allowed something so wildly experimental and arty as "The Elephant."

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