late to my own show

It got too long, so I began a Year Two Masterlist because that is a totally sane and normal way to live in fandom.

Please block #storkhousekeeping so as to not have my updates clog your Tumblr scroll.

The VERY MANY birthday cafes to be held in celebration of San's birthday! Wow the San bias are having a WONDERFUL season

Here for &Team. Other than Kei and Taki, I know nothing about this group. I just happened to log into Nol app just as cancel tickets were starting to pop up so I just grabbed one.

I listened to their songs on the drive to Incheon and they have GREAT SONGS. Also I learned something very important. I can listen to thrse mostly Japanese boys sing in Japanese without the unpleasant brain tilt feeling I get on Ateez, Stray Kids and TXT Japanese songs.

Which means I am having a hyper sensitive reaction to those guys' Korean-accented Japanese! THAT'S WHY I KEEP LOCKING INTO THE WEIRD MODE OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE LYRICS! Because Korean accented Japanese is sounds like warped Korean!! Ohhhh.

I dont speak Japanese but from just being East Asian I know what native Japanese sounds like and my guys so far are not it.

Is this even kpop anymore though if they are majority Japanese and sing mostly in Japanese?!?

Fascinating.

Just came here to add to the talk about San and the public's response to him.

I find it very interesting that basically EVERY stage of BAD has had San as the thumbnail.

Even the Kelly Clarkson stage has him as the thumbnail:

The only none San one I could find was this one of Hongjoong, but this is still the same Music Bank performance

It's not exactly surprising given everything but just found it rather interesting as usually for comeback stages it is unusual for just one member to be the thumbnail for most stages, even if one of them has gone viral.

Adrenaline for example (Miss this era so bad):

Especially odd since we know that they are going to be very limited stages for this era (I'm pretty sure this is it??). It certainly adds something to the topic of KQ possibly financing San's outbreak. Not that I mind, he looks great in all of these!

-jjongmongi

Hi!!

Okay so I guess we should celebrate first and then worry second

YAY for San. Look what I just saw!!

Translation by Storkmuffin. Also that guy knows he's hot so bonus points for calculated humility.

I think maybe the thumbnail situation is to do with Sannie currently being the one recognizable member for potential new Atiny. If the masses come looking for the chest bump guy, KQ wants to make sure they land on the right content.

Apparently, this has also happened.

I recall that when I joined the fandom with IOMT there was a sense that bunch of Katiny had a bunch of newbies had come in. I get the feeling it's happened again.

im kinda sad that my phone is an iphone so now i have to go through a way longer process to put music in there💔💔 before in my huawei i could just drop the music i wanted and that was it. im going to listen to the album when i get my internet back I SWEAR‼️‼️ (and go through the process of putting the music of my other three atz albums in there. have The World series in physical format)

but anyways!!! i just wanted to share that i fucking love V8 by vernon and The8 from seventeen. singasong saved me from the mental damage of BAD as a cb (atleast there arent any people being mean to e/o on the tl anymore), but it made me realize something about myself…

im a nostalgic loser😞😞

the album’s main thing is electronic music and hyperpop, and thats very nostalgic to me because of growing up with it… the album reminds me heavily of something that would drop on 2011 or 2020 (there was a huge spike of hyperpop in that era), and guess that i just value the past way more than whats new and might remind me of stuff that hurts. BAD (and atz) sweetie im sorry but you should have released after the world cup💔💔

(i pulled a very cute pc of jongho with a heart hand mirror. hes in the back of my phone now, bright af because the sleeve i have is sparkly with hearts🫶🫶 best thing that came from this cb fr)

Hi Boba Anon!

Publishing this because I'm very invested in this business of you getting your internet back, that was lost because of copper thieves. (I'm still finding this very surreal). All your stories with technology are so fascinating - You can just make the jump from a Huwei Android device to an Apple one without losing everything?? I thought Apple was a super closed off system??

I tried listening to the Vernon song and I guess I have a new enemy genre, unfortunately. I had to turn on my favorite pianist playing my favorite composer (Glenn Gould playing the Final Six Piano Sonatas of Haydn) to recover.

I am genuinely honestly shocked that “not enough lore” could be a conceivable criticism of the current comeback. From the very first teasers, this comeback has been thick with lore! The “question yourself” line was a callback to World Z indoctrination (telling people to not question things); possibly even using the same voice or voice clip. The concept trailer showed the members being taken over by Sopro, wondering what was happening to themselves, and coming to internal strife. And so on.

Anyways, lore resources! The starting point, imho, should be reading the diaries, which are authoritative lore. There are sites with the full text, as well as videos where they’re read like audiobooks, so people have choices on how to consume.

For lore on Tumblr, @atiny-for-life has a comprehensive series of writeups (see their pinned post), including about the Bad MV and the GH5 diary. The #ateez lore, #loretiny, and #loreteez tags are all fertile ground for in-depth posts by a variety of voices.

Outside of Tumblr, I liked the YouTube lore series you’ve previously linked, by Damanse. (I don’t think GH3 and onward have English subs yet, sadly.) There is also a massive slide deck of Ateez lore, for those inclined to that format.

One thing to keep in mind by anyone delving into lore is that there’s the official, canon lore, and then there are all the interpretations and theories, some more widely accepted and others built on the thinnest thread. Most of what I’ve seen on Tumblr is more speculative—because it’s fun, and Tumblr format is good for discussion and people adding onto each other’s theories. One thing I appreciated about the Damanse series is it has some speculation, but does a nice job of incorporating official sources beyond the diaries, which are scattered throughout Ateez content. So it’s a good foundation for then stepping into the more speculative stuff. (It’s also perfectly okay to go straight to speculating.) I haven’t read the slide deck but I gather that it similarly weaves together more official stuff.

Happy lore-ing for those interested!

San, GET BEHIND ME! (A grown man who is older than me, taller than me (though not by much) and could snap me in half.)

Maybe they feel comfortable coming to you because you don't like this comeback but, you obviously really like San so like?????

Putting the failings of a company on an individual member of a group will never not be goofy to me.

Being mad at San for...doing his job well and people liking him for it is certainly something.

HAHAHA The idea of spraying RAID at the antis is so funny. I love that illustration - she just seems so annoyed but unafraid. (I am very afraid of roaches. I lived in Florida for a while, which has the biggest roaches, so I was extremely annoying to people because I reacted every time I saw one like I was about to die.)

As for why the San antis come to me with strange bitchy takes about San when I've adored him all this time? I mean, there's an unfortunate aspect in which Tumblr is where the girlies who are too soft and too weak to hack it on X come to try to be ersatz X users. They're trying out the sharpness and nastiness of X, but because they're soft and weak, they can't actually get the tone right, and end up just seeming kind of nuts. I started smacking them in public once I figured out what they were. They don't even have the dignity of being a troll on X - they're a failed imitation troll who can't even come up with an original style.

i don't actually remember wtf the song was for class 43. I just. Plain. Cannot remember. I do remember I was late for it, and managed to follow along anyway.

So for Class 44, which was July 3, 2026, I trundled into class and found we had THREE new members, one of whom was this big dude, who came with his two female friends (family members?? not clear). They're all in their 50s, I think, and doing it for a lark. Well one of them was actually like, in a cute cheerleader-ballerina kind of skirt, under a comfy t shirt and over black leggings, and she was really committed to learning the steps.

The teacher, thinking she had the more advanced student and me, picked this song to be our class for my 44th Kpop class.

There's SO MUCH going on in this dance. All I know about Katseye is that there's a beautiful black girl with a French sounding name, who went on leave, and like, that fandom exploded with outrage and accusations. Having done this dance, i think maybe she really was exhausted, because this was the most athletic girl group dance I've ever done.

And, to my great surprise, I found that I could actually do all the steps as they were taught, and then retain them, and then do all the steps at speed. Not really dance them, the way the teacher in that video is doing, obviously, but actually do the steps with some integrity. I don't know how she's doing that with her hair, plus I'm scared my nerd glasses will fly off my face OR I'll otherwise hurt myself so I don't dare do the hair flips, but still. The foot work - flipping to the back to do the (incompetent) hip tossing (I don't actually know how to twerk), and then the right foot kick leading to the left foot straight out with a hip cock for the first pair of I'm the shit repeats, and then the foot turn and kick out for the third repeat for I'm the shit? Those are actually very tricky, and I know for a fact I couldn't have done them in the first 'term' of my dance lessons, at all. Or the thing where you look over your shoulder to do the left-right-left shift? I would lose my feet whenever I had to go back to front.

But not anymore. So that felt really great.

The three new classmates were repeatedly warned by the teacher that we were doing a hard one today, but they were great sports about it and had a good time, laughing at their own errors rather than getting horrified in a perfectionist way like I did and like White Hat did (she never did come back). They were so into the class that they stayed behind and asked the teacher to do a demonstration for them so one of them could film it and practice at home. I really hope they come back.

I do think the 7 (I had to miss one) classes of Shuffle Dance helped a lot. They actually did 'test' us. I mean it wasn't as harsh as all that - the trainee teacher did the steps with us, but we went through the whole sequence of Running Man (4 variations), Malaysian Running Man, T step, Charleston (3 variations), V step, criss cross, W step.

We all 'passed,' so I signed up for Level 1 Shuffle dance for a month to see if I continue to get benefits from it, in terms of my feet.

When we were done the teacher took a brief survey to ask, Which shuffle dance step did you see in the wild that made you want to learn Shuffle Dance?

And I don't think I'd realized it until then but I figured out in that moment that I'd taken shuffle dance because of Yeonjun.

Specifically this dance for I'll See You There Tomorrow, which had a resurgence viral moment. Especially at around the 10 second mark when they're singing '내일에서 기다릴테니" and he does the multiple ankle twists while tapping his back foot on the ground, and there's also a very short Charleston in there, AND a super-fast blink-and you'll miss it V step. I knew that I was not able to do all that with my ankles and feet, because of pronation and balance problems, and I wanted to learn. So my answer was Charleston and V Step. (I managed to not say, Yeonjun of TXT haha).

So now I can do this whole sequence without falling over or hurting myself, and on time, even, and cleanly.

The very first and the very last watercolor in my first sketchbook. I had seen all these prompts for artists that were supposed to help them fill a sketchbook so I was worried about doing that but I forgot that I don't do things at a normal person's level of intensity.

Trees continue to be a problem but I decided to make things more difficult for myself by adding clouds to my list of things I am ambitious about.

I found people easier to draw in than I expected, but the next task is to figure out what to do with them in watercolor.

Experimenting and playing around. I recently saw a post by a watercolor teacher in Instagram advising people to work with a small sketchbook because it lowers friction and intimidation factor. Ha!

Also, as someone who has watched so many Choi San videos that I am now on the Korean side of Instagram Reels, there is a fourth variation of videos featuring him now: it appears to be Korean men trying to poorly (for the most part) imitate him while their wives or girlfriends record them.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaSzoGcpHq1/?igsh=MXZ2OWI1cm42NmZtaQ==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaVK8lCvmWj/?igsh=N3VsMmE4YzhtZnVt

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaVA7jOSnnp/?igsh=aGx2b2JmcXhuOHBq

Heeehee These guys are good partners. It's always good to aim as high as possible. And this is SUCH a great thing for San because especially for his generation of kpop, in addition to the usual (sigh, let's say it with me) misogyny and general contempt for all things that women like just because women like them, there's this sense that the aesthetic doesn't reflect anything that men actually consider imitating in any way, no matter how much their girlfriend or wife is into it. But with San we've had a breakthrough!!

Here we are! Very proud.

Also, funny personal story about someone in my wider social network having the San chest pump land on her algorithm.

I get a regular massage (yes, very privileged), and my masseuse knows about my kpop fandom thing, so she said, I have seen the San guy from that group you like all over my social media. And I was thrilled, in spite of everything, so I said, AND WHAT DID YOU THINK?

She was off and running - He is incredibly good looking. His body is amazing. And he's so good at performing! Everyone is talking about it. He really, really hit it big!! And so on and so forth.

She asked really specific questions: When did he bulk up and why? What's he like, when he's not on stage? What else is he good at?

Some things that came out:

She looked up San pre bulk-up, so I guess like 2022 San, and was surprised at how extremely thin he used to be.

She had no interest in the song or the group as a whole, because "from what I saw, he's the only one with any presence." (Me, dying in Hotteokism, because for this cb? I agree with her. ㅠㅠㅠㅠ)

But the algorithms are going overtime because San's specific chest bump has now taken over a lot of people's social media feed, and those tend to lead to IOMT Duke of the North stuff and then back to I guess, Work - so only to the start of the Golden Hour series.

She was immensely surprised that Ateez hav ebeen active and in business for 8 years. She had heard of San (with IOMT) but because the interest remained only with San, she hadn't realized this was actually a longstanding kpop group.

The inquiry she had done otherwise I think was to try to find out how she had missed out on this gem of an Idol before, and she learned that 90% of the Ateez fandom is actually foreign. "Why did that happen, though? San is amazing!" I said, "That company always aimed itself at the overseas market first, and it still kind of does."