#7: Catharsis, techno, and meeting strangers off the internet - January in review
This newsletter is a little late going out because I’ve spent most of January hosting friends. Each one, to a tee, has had the same reaction upon stepping into my apartment: “This place really feels like you.” It’s praise that makes me positively incandescent to receive, and it's gotten me reflecting on how many iterations of living spaces I've gone through to reach this point.
I’ve never felt capable of calling a place “home” before — the concept of a “home” encapsulates a sense of safety, permanence, and emotional security that has been absent from the places I’ve lived in the past. For a long time, I was unmoored and flighty: unable to set down roots or feel a sense of belonging, always anticipating moving to the next thing.
But I’m starting to flirt with the idea that there doesn’t always need to be a next thing. That I might be able to pause, and breathe, and allow myself to fully occupy whatever container I’ve poured myself into. And as I grow comfortable with that thought, I've also experimented with what it looks like to mold my apartment into both a reflection of, and a haven for, myself. There are fandom prints on the walls; there’s always a candle burning; my shelves are fit to bursting with paperbacks and trinkets. I finally invested in a nice couch and a projector to facilitate movie nights, and I make sure to stay stocked up on fun beverages.
It turns out that if you endeavor to turn your apartment into sanctuary and creative studio and fount of joy, it'll naturally become a pure expression of self. Somewhere between trips to the Container Store and learning how to operate power tools, this apartment has transformed from “just another address” into “somewhere I can call home”.
I’d love to show it to you sometime. Give me a shout if you’re ever in the area :)
What I’ve been listening to:
Livicifer
Meet Livicifer: a techno/electronica producer who has been dropping a new album on YouTube nearly every day for the past 5 months, to the thunderous applause of… um, let me check my notes… basically just me?
Although Livicifer has a couple of Spotify releases with 100k+ listens, the standard view count on the majority of their nearly 12,000 Youtube releases (yes, that is the correct number of zeroes) sits somewhere between 0 and 20. Which is a shame, because Livicifer’s music is a lot of fun! It’s upbeat, fast-paced, synth-y, and heavy on electronic guitar in a manner vaguely evocative of video game soundtracks. And in the same way that a video game soundtrack might keep you focused on a boring task, Livicifer’s music makes for fantastic background noise when you’re doing chores or need to lock in.
I’m a little obsessed with Livicifer’s commitment to releasing music despite the complete lack of response they’ve received. Between their absence from social media and lack of existence And I’d love to boost their viewership a bit! Next time you’re folding your laundry, why not give their most recent album a listen? Or generate a number between 1 and 12,000 and see what your governmentally assigned Livicifer kin track is.
What I’ve been reading:
Somewhere Beyond the Sea
by TJ Klune
⭐ ⭐
The House in the Cerulean Sea is a quintessential queer fantasy read. It’s got a slow burn relationship, a delightful found family, a queernormative universe, and a generally cozy vibe. So you can imagine how excited I was to hear that a sequel had been published. A deeper dive into middle-aged queer love with a guaranteed happy ending? Sign me the fuck up!
Alas, that love was not meant to be.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea feels like a book that was a lot of fun to write, at the detriment of being fun to read. It’s unexpectedly preachy and moralistic, with antagonists that are such caricatures of every type of bigotry under the sun that they defy parody. We did get a deeper look at Arthur, which I adored, but most of the book was dedicated to convincing the reader that the children are perfect just as they are. But I already loved the children, and the family they’d built, and the community in which they lived. I didn’t need to be brought around again. I’d much rather have had 400 pages of slice-of-life vignettes, without any kind of villain or overarching message, than what I got instead.
This Goodreads review put it well: “In the end, I’m left with one question: Did we need this book? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. Book#1 stood wonderfully on its own, and whilst the book had somewhat of an open-ended resolution, I don’t think Somewhere Beyond the Sea was the answer to that. I don’t even think it needed to be answered. Not everything needs to be tied up with a neat little bow.”
What I’ve been watching:
Perfect Blue
I really only watch sad or distressing movies when I’m having a certified Depression Session™️ and need a ready-made outlet for emotional catharsis. The last time I was depressed, I called up some friends and we put on Perfect Blue. I wouldn’t say it was the best choice to make, but it was certainly the right one.
Perfect Blue is viscerally haunting, deeply unsettling, and almost forcefully engaging. Told through disjointed shots that deliberately blur the lines between reality and hallucination, Perfect Blue ratchets up the tension to a fever pitch within minutes, then proceeds to balance the tension on a knife’s edge for the next 90 minutes. The viewer not just watches Mima struggle to discern truth from fiction but becomes mired in confusion right alongside her, all the while coming to the distressing realization that the viewer is reflected as much in Mima’s voyeurs as in Mima herself.
Do not watch this if you are unwell. Or perhaps only watch this when you are unwell. It doesn’t matter; you’ll come out of this unwell regardless of how you go into it.
Watch Perfect Blue on Archive.org
Other things I’ve been up to:
I have a friend on Tumblr who I’ve known for 5 years. We share similar tastes in media and fictional characters and tropes that drive us feral, so we’ve followed each other down countless rabbit holes over the years: the Witcher, Inception, Temeraire, A Taste of Gold and Iron, Prophet, Arcane. When I need to all-caps rant about a book that is driving me crazy, their inbox is the first one I open. I know a great many things about my friend: they’re a dancer and a writer and they have a rivalry with a receptionist at their local clinic.
One thing I didn’t know about my friend until a week ago, when I walked into a coffee shop in west Manhattan and met them IRL for the first time, was their name.
The vast majority of my close friendships were forged in the crucible of the World Wide Web, so I’m no stranger to the art of building genuine, intimate connection with someone about whom I lack even the most basic personal information. But it’s been years since I’ve formed an internet friendship strong enough to move IRL, and longer still since I’ve had occasion to do so with a friendship born of fandom. This is, in large part, because online fandom culture has been shifting. Ye olden online gathering spaces where anonymity was de rigueur are dying out; conservatism (or “anti-ism”) and cringe culture are on the rise; and all in all, there’s been a large-scale shift towards viewing fandom as something to be consumed rather than participated in. This all contributes to a fannish culture (at least in my corner of the internet) that disincentivizes, if not outright disallows, the formation of relationships that can deepen and thrive in the throes of pure anonymity, without needing to disclose some measure of personally identifying information.
The days where you could kindle a truly anonymous internet friendship, predicated only on shared interests and/or writing smut for each other, without ever once knowing each other’s names or pronouns or ages, are…not gone, but certainly dwindling.
So meeting my beloved Tumblr friend IRL was magical in a lot of ways. Not just because I got to hang out with a friend, and forge a new level of trust between us, and fangirl together in real actual physical life. But also because the blossoming of our friendship has been deeply nostalgic of that slowly fading era of fandom, where some of my dearest friends were little more than icons on my computer. It’s kind of fun that it took me 5 years to learn their name. Maybe in another 5 years I’ll learn what they do for work.
