Songs to oblivion

Oh jesus christ"

So this is from 30,000 Miles From Chang’an, which is a 2 hours 47 minutes(!!?) long Chinese animated film that is basically an actually legitimate historical epic and historical biopic (think Gladiator & Amadeus) made into animation, and also passionate tribute to classical art and culture, similar to something like Miss Hokusai or Millennium Actress.

I heard it was decent before, but was not expecting it to be This Ambitious. The Criminally Underrated Champ of 2023 Animation

Once again the greedy assholes have stuck "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" on Apple+.

This cartoon has been a Halloween tradition of mine since it first aired in 1966 on network TV.  For decades kids enjoyed this for free.

So it infuriates me that now the only people who can see it have to pay for streaming or the DVD.  I can't even afford streaming.

So here it is, the whole thing.  Feel free to reblog, download and/or share.

whole thing. Feel free to reblog,

download and/or share.

If it were just like 1984, these terms would have been mandated from the top. They would exist to flatten conversation and make it impossible to talk about topics.

What we have with “unalive” is the refusal of Gen Z and Gen Alpha to bow to censorship or to accept that they simply can’t talk about something. TikTok’s platform rules say, “we’ll shut you down or shadowban you if you talk about death or sex,” and Gen Z and Gen Alpha say, “nah, fuck you, actually, if you put a wall in front of us, we’ll tunnel under it.”

“Unalive” is this generation’s “Friend of Dorothy,” and while I am frustrated by the policies which make it necessary, I am heartened and indeed thrilled that the response was not acquiescence but the spontaneous communal creation of terms which said, very clearly, “you can try to censor us, but we’ll just go around you.”

Language evolves and changes and grows. People use things sarcastically or to mark themselves as part of a group. I type out “folx” not because I don’t think “folks” is already gender-neutral but - in part - because it separates me from my homophobic father’s use of folks and immediately marks me out as a Publicly Homosexual and Transsexual Person.

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old, and this is like the … tenth or eleventh iteration of “the children are ruining language!” that I’ve seen, minimum, but like, two things are true:

The English language is far sturdier than any of this pearl-clutching would have you believe and

You know what they mean, so this language they’re using? It’s successful. You may be annoyed by it, but it has communicated, which is all language needs to do.

Besides, “unalive” is like 200+ years old. TikTok kids just did a little convergent linguistic evolution.

Like, really. For one, it’s fine. For two, unalive is actually an old word. For three, it’s fucking fine, actually. For four, it’s a demonstration of linguistic hardiness. For five, this sounds to me like when my dad would respond, “HAY IS FOR HORSES AND I’M A PERSON, SAY HELLO,” 35 years ago, or castigate me over my “overuse” of “like” (you know, the way you just read past at the beginning of this paragraph and didn’t think anything of at all), or the way teachers would make me bend my sentences into unnatural-sounding messes so they didn’t end with a preposition. For six? It’s fucking fine.

MORE PHOTS IN MUH REBLOG

Psst. Don't tell the jolkein rolkein rolkein estate, but this is amazing. DO consider buying a print from the extraordinary artist responsible:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/leiaham/

Original Twitter thread with the artist's thoughts and commentary:

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.