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Everyone’s making end-of-the-year lists, so I thought I’d join in on the fun. Here’s my end-of-the-year list of songs and albums. And if you want more, I’ll write one about books and TV shows/movies.
I spend most of my days in the company of myself, so I spend a lot of time listening to music, both new and old, but here, I’ll be focusing on songs and albums released this year. I’ve long said it takes a few years for a decade’s style to reveal itself to us – much of what people consider Y2K isn’t really Y2K, it’s a mishmash of 2003-2006, and all the classic albums released in those years are turning twenty.
Since 2020 and 2021 exist in a haze and for good reason – the pandemic forced artists to postpone their albums and accompanying tours – those years didn’t feel like the 2020’s. Though 2022 and 2023 saw the return of live music, those years exist as an extension of the years before it. So, it wasn’t until last year that we started to hear the music of the 2020s.
And baby, dance music is back!
In 2024, Charli xcx gave us Brat summer, but little did we know it would lead to a year of dance music.
FKA twigs released Eusexua in January, and I’ve been listening to it since. Childlike Things sparked controversy with the inclusion of North West’s voice. North’s father disapproved of his daughter’s inclusion, but also, he claimed chattel slavery was a choice, so, I wouldn’t consider him an authority on anything, much less on his children. He seems to be more out of than in those children’s lives these days. Plus, Kim K was with her daughter when they were shooting the video. Twigs has said she wrote the song when she was around North’s age, and what’s more authentic than having a teenager singing a song written from a teenager’s POV?
While I’ve never been as famous as North – and honestly, who would want to be? I have been on TV sets and in studios. It was fun, and North seemed to have a good time. Together, she and twigs gave us a playful, catchy song.
I played the song for my mom after she told me about Kanye’s comments, she thought the song was fun and was surprised to hear North singing in Japanese. Little did we know, that would be one of this year’s themes: artists purposefully singing in languages other than English.
We are witnessing a test of American hegemonic control of the arts and entertainment.
On the eve of the Epiphany, Bad Bunny released Debí Tirar Más Fotos to worldwide acclaim. In Miami, I felt so removed from the winter holidays. All these holiday movies showed people watching, playing, and cleaning snow and I had never seen a snowflake. My palm-lined streets were a little drier, a little windier, and a little quieter. And that’s what DTMF feels like: a tropical winter. The standout is Baile Inolvidable, a song channeling the past and present of salsa in 6 minutes.
But the song I keep coming back to is Nuevayol. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have long lived in community with each other in New York’s five boroughs. The video reminds me of the quinceañeras I couldn’t attend but saw in photo albums and of arriving in NYC and feeling that cold for the first time. But most of all, the song reminds me of the New York I had imagined: the promised New York, where dreams come true.
My mom said the first time she took the train to Borough Hall she laughed – the place she had only heard in song was real.
But we had arrived and made New York home.
Disease arrived as a single in October 2024 and with it, a new era for Gaga. This Gaga was done singing showtunes but wasn’t ready to take off the costumes. Mayhem is an album only someone in Gaga’s position could release – it sees her remixing old styles into something new. Though I wish the songs were more like Disease and less like Blades of Grass, there’s something for fans of every era.
I’ve been critical of Rosalía being lauded as an expert on the genres of music she’s only dipped her toes into, but I’ve never been critical of her voice. The woman can sing. And in this era of whispering pop stars, her voice is much needed. I wish Lux had more songs like Berghain and less like La Perla, but pop audiences don’t like being challenged by their pop stars. Singing in multiple languages, blending genres, and bringing back the 90’s obsession with classical music was a needed addition to her oeuvre.
And lastly, but certainly not least, Amaarae’s Black Star is a distillation of various Black music styles from both sides of the Atlantic. Listening to the album feels like moving through time. Admittedly, I’m less familiar with Ghanaian highlife than with the musical styles of the Americas, but she seamlessly melds these sounds together.
Favorite Albums and Songs:
Amaarae – Black Star
S.M.O.
Bad Bunny – Debí tirar más fotos
La Mudanza
Deftones – Private Music
infinite source
FKA twigs – Eusexua
Drums of Death
Lady Gaga – Mayhem
Abracadabra (Gesaffelstein Remix)
Linkin Park – From Zero (Deluxe Edition)
Two Faced
Nine Inch Nails – TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
I Know You Can Feel it
PinkPantheress – Fancy That & Fancy Some More?
Stateside & Stateside + Zara Larsson
Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
Get It Off
Rosalía – Lux
Porcelana
Honorable mentions:
Addison Rae – Addison
Ethel Cain – Perverts
Not For Radio – Melt
Sudan Archives – The BPM
Zara Larsson – Midnight Sun
The honorable mentions include albums I wouldn’t have found or listened to if it weren’t for the people on my social media feeds recommending them. I’ve never been much of an Ethel Cain fan, but as an exercise in noise, Perverts is perfect. It’s heavy, haunting, and at times, difficult to listen to… I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the experience, but I did feel like a different person having listened to it.
Likewise, I hadn’t heard The Marías until the dreamy Otro Atardecer, on Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, but María Zardoya’s EP Melt, was exactly what I wanted and needed to hear in the fall.
The BPM brings the sounds of the Midwest and the Jersey shore to the forefront. Her “Gadget Girl” persona reminds me of Janelle Monáe circa Dirty Computer.
Addison and Midnight Sun are fun, pop-forward dance albums with clear American and European influences and seem to be in conversation with each other. Addison Rae was born and raised in Louisiana like Britney Spears and her influence is clear. Zara Larsson, on the other hand, hails from Sweden, and it’s clear she’s influenced by Robyn’s electropop.
As for next year, I’m looking forward to Gorillaz’s new album, The Mountain. Gorillaz has always been one of my favorite bands and though I didn’t love The Happy Dictator when I first heard it, the second single, The Manifesto, reaffirmed my love for the band. Thus far, the best track is Damascus. I first heard Omar Souleyman through Björk, who’s had a notable year, with her inclusion on Rosalía’s Berghain. But I love Yasiin Bey’s verses, especially:
Turkish coffee, Starbucks, you’re corny
The track is infectious; it makes you want to get up and dance.
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‘Mexico 86’ is Diego Luna’s love letter to ‘the beautiful game’
In 'Mexico 86,' on Netflix starting Friday, Luna plays a fictional man in a partially truthful story about how the country defeated more pow
Luna worries that the exorbitant ticket prices for the upcoming World Cup (hosted across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada) will prevent everyday fútbol fans from attending. “I don’t know who will be able to afford these tickets, but it’s obvious that the people who go to watch fútbol every weekend in Mexico are not invited to the World Cup anymore,” he says. “They will have to watch it on screens in public squares.”
The claim that this year’s World Cup (starting June 11) is being organized among three countries is nothing but a smokescreen, Luna believes.“
In reality, the United States is organizing it, while Mexico and Canada have each been allotted just 13 matches,” he explains. “Yet the United States — a country currently fighting with the rest of the world — is hosting over 70. It defies understanding how they can aspire to host a tournament that is fundamentally about justice, equity and the communion of diverse cultures.”
point of reference from an able-bodied person: standing in one place for an hour kinda makes my feet/legs hurt. longer than that is when it really hits but it takes an hour to get there.
if you are in pain within minutes or seconds, that is not normal. that is a Symptom. poke your doctor into finding out what it is or connect with disabled and chronic pain groups.
if you are in extreme pain, not just "ugh my feet ache" pain but "i am going to pass out" pain, that is not normal. that is a Symptom. poke your doctor into finding out what it is or connect with disabled and chronic pain groups.
I know some people try to rationalize as "well it's not excruciating compared to my baseline" and I am gently reminding you that the baseline is zero. zero is normal. this ^ is not. be kind to yourself.
I love how everyone is still asking hey so my symptoms are actually symptoms? Even if I feel only x amount of pain after x amount of time? BUDDY THE NORM IS FEELING MILD DISCOMFORT AT MOST AFTER STANDING FOR AN HOUR AND THEY RECOVER WITHIN A FEW HOURS TO A DAY
Meanwhile document the actual effect the pain/etc has on your life. Document how it impacts your ability to cook; your ability to clean; your ability to clean yourself; your ability to sleep; your ability to work; document all attempts to be more active and how the pain interferes with them. If you have to do something other than just go stand in the kitchen for ~1hr to cook a meal, that's something to write down; if you have to choose not to have a shower because it'll hurt, write that down. If the pain prevents you from going for a walk, write that down.
Every single time you make a decision about what you're doing based on the pain, you document that; every time you have to endure the pain for a necessary activity which then impacts what ELSE you can do, write that down too, with a direct connection.
(Warning: this will probably be depressing as all fuck and you will probably hate it. You are almost certainly ignoring the impact of pain on you way more than you think you are, and having to face it will feel bad in the short run. Very bad.)
And then you bring it either to your new doctor or if you MUST, to your current doctor, and you say: this is how the pain currently affects my quality of life. This is what I would be doing if I weren't prevented from doing it because of the pain.
Say that you would like to find the reason for this pain and you would like them to order relevant diagnostic tests. If they refuse, or hem and haw, ask them to document clearly in your records that you requested this and both that they refuse and their reasons for refusing.
If you must deal with the same doctor, document the concerns you have with the weight-loss drugs, and ask your doctor to be explicit about why she thinks that these risks are worth something that does not directly address your actual concerns. Ask why this is their first line treatment for the rest of what you've described, and why they are more concerned with pushing an overprescribed treatment than actually investigating the cause of your pain and addressing it appropriately based on an evidence-based diagnosis.
This isn't a guarantee, but it's part of the process.
…. Also yes, I AM serious that you should be able to be in the kitchen for about an hour, on your feet and doing Cooking Things, without pain and without needing Recovery Time, in order to make yourself dinner and if you CAN’T - if that long results in Pain or Dramatic Fatigue or extended recovery - that is a Symptom. A big symptom.
A while ago, I started keeping a pain journal to log my chronic pain and other things, so that I could take it to my doctor’s appointments. I go into detail about it in this post if anyone is interested. My doctor is fantastic and actually listened to me and bothered to investigate my pain, but the pain journal was still a huge help in communicating my health issues clearly. I highly recommend logging your pain (and anything else you feel might be relevant).
Side note: I found the pain journal experience to be really enjoyable because I got to pull out my colorful pens and my cute stationery supplies and make something pretty every day. I decorated my notebook with stickers. I did have to face the way my pain was impacting me, but I got to do it in a fun and colorful way. It helped a lot.
Even if it is major depressive disorder, this level of Incapacity and Exhaustion isn’t “just depressed”, it’s “suffering from a genuinely dangerous illness that needs to be treated or better treated right now”. If you’re not being treated, please pursue it; if you are, you need to go to your healthcare provider and say “this isn’t working well enough, fix it”. I’m not kidding when I say “dangerous” - our disease has a high mortality rate and this kind of incapacitation is linked with it trending that way.
BUT ADDITIONALLY: for this level of fatigue please force them to give you appropriate tests for Everything. Anaemia, thyroid issues, sleep apnea, EVERYTHING. Assuming depression can miss very treatable physiological disorders and very DANGEROUS ones as well.
This isn’t just a flaw or a down mood; this is VERY BIG SYMPTOM you’re having and it is a Risk to leave it uninvestigated.
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This is why I have no sympathy whatsoever for anti-intellectuals who complain when discussion posts use too much academic language. "You can't expect me to whip out a dictionary every time you post—" BITCH I LOOKED UP "AHEGAO" FOR YOU. OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF MY HEART.
In the tradition of film historian Donald Bogle and filmmaker Marlon Riggs, the Obama era of media reevaluation expanded on their work in print, online, podcasts and video. Suddenly, there was a media ecosystem for the kind of racial analysis that had often been relegated to college spaces and exclusive intellectual circles. And thanks to the internet, these new critiques came instantly and often without any longstanding editorial review. Necessary critiques of films like The Blind Side (2009), The Help (2011), andGreen Book(2018) pushed back against the idea that we were living in a post-racialsociety.
As consumers and social media users, we posted and read these essays and Twitter threads in real time, which allowed us to respond immediately and keep the discourse going. But the downside to having a steady stream of criticism is that every film becomes a critical battlefield of its own. Every marginalized character is evaluated as if they are a stand-in for every single member of their community, usually as they relate (or don’t) to the person critiquing the piece of media.
When it comes to cinema, representation has become the viewer’s primary concern as well, with little formal analysis of the cinematic image itself.
Inside the Making of The Odyssey With Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Christopher Nolan
How Hollywood’s three leading-est men led a cast and crew of hundreds to help Nolan create his most epic and ambitious blockbuster to date.
Sitting there with Nolan, you could almost hear a clock ticking. From the beginning—think of Memento, Nolan’s second feature, which is told both backwards and forwards—time and how it wears on us has been his great subject. Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) are about not having enough of it, of being trapped helplessly beyond your own life, watching it go by. In Tenet, characters move through time in both directions, forming ever more complex knots, doing and undoing things they’ve already done. Dunkirk tells three different stories over three different timelines: The implication is, an hour can feel like a day can feel like a week, and vice versa. “I’m often asked, ‘Why do you make films about time?’ ” Nolan said. “And my glib answer, but it’s a good one, is because I’ve always lived in it. It’s the motor in all of our lives. It’s the thing we’re fighting the whole time. It’s the thing that torments us or plagues us all along.”
Nolan is famously cagey about himself, preferring to focus on the work, which he can control. “Chris is quite superstitious,” Pattinson told me. “There’s an element of mysticism. Though he’ll be like: ‘There isn’t.’ ”
But it’s not hard to see the march forward through the human experience in his films. “Whenever I got married, I was making films about the motivating force being a guy’s wife who died or whatever,” Nolan said. “And then I had kids and started making films about kids.” Damon, who has four children, said that when he read Nolan’s Interstellar for the first time, he was on a movie set: “I was so emotional reading this script because I had little kids. I was overseas, away from them for two weeks, but I was still away from them. And that script is about losing the entire childhood of your kid. And I remember calling him after and going like, ‘What the fuck is it with you about this?’ ” Nolan and Thomas have four children as well. “The tension is in so many of my films between family and wanting to be with family and having responsibilities outside of that, being pulled outside of that,” Nolan told me. “It’s something I relate to very strongly.”
@lisxdumbr excuse me as I borrow your tag for a moment, cause we're onto something.
Rent-lowering gunshots aside, I think this highlights a pretty fundamental quality to tumblr memes, which is they're meant to be fun, not funny.
Most Goncharov content aren't funny. They don't make you laugh as an audience. In fact, there's some serious and awe inspiring quality fanarts, music, fanfics, and analysis on a non-existing flim. It's not about making the funniest joke, it's about having fun making the joke.
Tumblr memes aren't meant to entertain a passive audience. The entertainment value is in the participation. And this quality is present in a lot of long-form tumblr memes. Colour theory, urban gothic (short lived but glorious), hawkeye initiative (short lived but glorious), making shitpost arguments into shakespeare, @theshitpostcalligrapher (excuse the tag) and other shitpost calligraphy. A lot of these memes are about taking silly things seriously. And even passively reblogging these memes are about participation. "I can take this seriously too." Or, in Goncharov's case, "yeah I'll help collectively gaslight the internet".
Another big part about sharing it isn't about how funny the joke is, but how impress you are with the effort. As an audience you can feel the love artists/musicians/writers put into their Goncharov fanwork, and can't help but have respect.
This same logic goes for how coffeeshop fics are fun to write, but they aren't funny. The charm for the reader is that someone loved these characters as much as you did.
In contrast, when you look at viral tweets, they're often one-shots. They're very funny and witty but you don't tend to get the same degree of repetition and variations. Because twitter is built for consumption and snappier participation, and the increasingly algorithm-driven navigation makes content more competitive, which means quality lies in individual tweets, and not in the whole phenomenon.
tldr; Tumblr memes/jokes are about how fun they are to make/share. Twitter jokes are about how fun they are to consume.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
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alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
Ambitious and unapologetically erotic, Interview With the Vampire returns to give its fans an existential crisis.
The ambitious, stunning, unapologetically erotic Interview With the Vampire is back and giving longtime fans an existential crisis.
IWTV’s first two seasons are framed by the infamous interview Louis gives to journalist and Interview With the Vampire writer Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and adorned with lots of operatic set pieces, gallons of viscera, dialogue that prances between lustful and hateful, and Anderson and Reid’s magnetic chemistry. The baroque melodrama of Rice’s prose remained intact, but the episodes tackled America and Europe’s penchants for racism, xenophobia, and homophobia more directly. The second season culminated in a play staged by the bloodsucking troupe Théâtre des Vampires in which Louis and Lestat’s vampire daughter, Claudia (Delainey Hayles), is killed onstage before a cheering audience of humans who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing, a stunning encapsulation of the show’s high and low taste. AMC is “the first network ever that I could say, ‘The thing that people see on television is the thing I wanted to make,’” says Jones, a Pulitzer-finalist playwright who put in time on Friday Night Lights, Weeds, and Boardwalk Empire.
And now, in its third season, the show is blowing itself up. It’s changed its name to acknowledge its new source material (Rice’s second novel) and to signal Lestat’s newfound, fourth-wall-breaking control of the narrative. It is now structured around his band’s tour, for which Reid had to record original songs and perform them on set. The season starts with its central couple in the throes of a breakup, much to the chagrin of the series’ most fervent fans, who call the pairing “Loustat,” describe them as “true soulmates” who “match each other’s freak … in the most unconventional manner,” and soundtrack TikTok odes to their relationship with music from Megan Thee Stallion and Sufjan Stevens. (Molloy calling Louis and Lestat “Taylor and Travis” in a season-three clip sent reverberations through the base.) Will Vampire’s loyal, if still modest, fandom buy into an experiment that changes the show’s primary protagonist and its established storytelling mode, complete with an incest storyline that puts George R.R. Martin’s bibliography to shame? More important, can it rally the kind of viewership and mainstream awareness that turned Heated Rivalry into a phenomenon and guarantee a future past season three?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.
People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.
And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.
And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?
Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.
*takes the hand of a period drama writer gently* A queen consort is not a queen regnant. A dowager queen is not a queen regnant either.
There is very little intrinsic institutional power in queenship. The power a consort, dowager, or queen mother has depends mostly on how much the reigning sovereign (usually a man) is willing to grant her. Needing a queen to serve as regent is exceptionally rare, and the regent is more often a male relative.
Queen regnant: woman who rules in her own right, not on behalf of someone else.
Regent: Someone who temporarily assumes the powers of the monarch on account of the monarch being too young or too incapacitated to govern.
Queen consort: Woman who is married to the monarch.
Dowager queen: Woman who was married to the monarch. The monarch is dead, and she is owed support as his widow.
Queen mother: Woman who is the mother of the monarch. Usually the dowager queen, though there are exceptions if there isn't a straight line of succession.
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Some of the earliest clues that GLP-1 drugs might reshape the brain emerged almost by accident, through research on a hormonal disorder affecting 1 in 10 U.S. women. Once known as PCOS and now increasingly called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, the complex endocrine disorder can lead to hormonal dysfunction, metabolic abnormalities and abnormal tissue growth that can affect fertility.
At the University of Colorado Anschutz, pediatric endocrinologist Melanie Cree had been studying whether the drugs could help adolescents with the condition by reducing excess weight and stabilizing blood sugar. As Cree’s trial progressed, her colleague Shapiro began scanning participants’ brains, looking for neurological changes that might accompany the metabolic ones.
What she found pointed researchers toward a deeper possibility: that the disorder may involve dysfunction in the hypothalamus, the small but powerful brain region that helps regulate hunger, stress, sleep and hormones. The area also contains a high concentration of GLP-1 receptors.
Acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons claimed in March that Hernandez had “abandoned” her son to a “violent murderer” who killed him weeks later. ICE had arrested her after a sheriff’s deputy in Baldwin County, Alabama, stopped the car she was riding in with her sister to work. Contrary to Lyons’s assertion, Hernandez said she had begged ICE to deport her with Orlin. Instead, the child and his cousins were put in the custody of her sister’s estranged partner, Samuel Maldonado. He was a laborer who had been in the Honduran military and the father of her sister’s three young children.
Police say Maldonado drank heavily, whipped the children with a wire, and dealt the most vicious blows to Orlin. The boy had multiple broken bones and signs of sexual battery. He had been stomped on, burned with a lighter, and suffered at least 17 blows to the head. Maldonado has been charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty.
The case has stirred outrage, prompted calls for a full accounting of ICE’s actions and shone a light on the sometimes dangerous situations children are left in when their parents are detained or deported. After Orlin’s death, some Florida sheriffs who signed up to help DHS with immigration enforcement during routine matters like traffic stops said the effort should focus on serious criminals.
