Introduction
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Nothing makes you feel old like a broken back. Just slipping, falling and landing wrong, in a way that blows out your back wall but not the sexy way. More of a spending the next several months in a brace way. In a way where an object on the floor might as well be on the moon. In a way where you have to buy a new bed because you can't move when you wake up in the old one. In a way where I declined body and mind and will have to spend the next year building myself back up physically and mentally.
Something that strips all illusions and tells you that you, Athene, are fucking old now. You are in fact, almost fucking forty. You feel almost forty. You spent 3 years of the last good decade possible doing nothing and you're in the fight of your life now. Worse, you now have to deal with the most dangerous foe of the old: Nostalgia. I hate Nostalgia on general principle. An idealized image of the past drawn from privileged groups remembering how fucking great it was to not have to have adult worries and failing bodies. The Summer of Love? No, you mean the Long Hot Summer of 1967. You love the 80s? Well, go look at how many biographies of LGBT people actually make it past 1992. I hate rosy views of the past. They both fuel reactionaries and cause us to lose track of the actual progress we've made.
And yet? I feel Nostalgic. I have the advantage of Enshitification making it so I can in fact actually say that a lot of things were better when I was younger, but I wish to reject that. I wish to interrogate my sense of loss and really try to judge if I'm actually missing something good. I'm starting off easy, with The Simpsons. I have wanted to go through every episode of the Simpsons for a while, but when I went to watch them on Disney+ it all felt hollow. I realized later that it was part of my general growing dissatisfaction with streaming and how I enjoy the Simpsons in the first place. The episodes are just the episodes and they didn't even do that right at first, with the rather famous problem of them stretching to widescreen a show that makes use of every inch of the frame. The first season was especially bad as it made some episodes nauseating to watch because of how they were framed. They've fixed this, but I maintain this is still not the true experience.
See, the Simpsons had a lot of bonus features in all their DVDs. Deleted scenes, behind the scenes animation, commercials and audio commentaries. The Audio commentaries are among the best out there, with a good glimpse into how the shows are made, what inspired the creators, humorous banter between them and Mike Reiss telling you that The Simpsons was the first use of still images moving in rapid succession to trick your brain into a perception of motion. That joke will become funnier, I swear, but the gist here is that I absolutely enjoyed the Audio Commentaries the entire time I owned the original episodes and I missed their absence. They didn't have to be missing, before they were bought out, FXX had streaming editions of the Simpsons complete with the audio commentaries. All it is, is a separate audio track to go along with all the dubs and they are either unable to or don't care about including them.
I have been getting back into owning physical copies of media again recently, and so I have been rebuying seasons of the Simpsons (long story). I have to find used copies since the stock of new copies is so low, but I've been slowly rebuilding them and god I never knew how much I missed this. Yeah, its inconvenient and takes up space, and any attempt to try to say how much I like it is going to make me sound old as shit, but I like it. And I'm old as shit.
But boy, that's a really rambling way to actually describe what I'm doing isn't it? I have not been very productive for a while, because of stress and injury. I've really let myself go even further from where I was during the pandemic, and I've been feeling depressed because of my age. I transitioned "late" into life, I missed years of my life due to COVID and I broke my back at the start of the year. I feel I missed out on a lot of my life before "old age" hit. As part of my rehabilitation into a more functional human, I want to become more productive again and write more. So I am starting with The Simpsons' again, where my love of comedy and media began when my biological mom showed me my first episode on May 9, 1991. I'm going to be reviewing both the episodes and the DVDs, as well as commenting on how well they hold up because hoo boy, while the comedy generally works there is some STUFF in these. I hope everyone will enjoy, even if its a bit silly and self-indulgent.
Episode capsules/reviews will start soon, but first, lets come up with a very loose set of categories!
Something that strips all illusions and tells you that you, Athene, are fucking old now. You are in fact, almost fucking forty. You feel almost forty. You spent 3 years of the last good decade possible doing nothing and you're in the fight of your life now. Worse, you now have to deal with the most dangerous foe of the old: Nostalgia. I hate Nostalgia on general principle. An idealized image of the past drawn from privileged groups remembering how fucking great it was to not have to have adult worries and failing bodies. The Summer of Love? No, you mean the Long Hot Summer of 1967. You love the 80s? Well, go look at how many biographies of LGBT people actually make it past 1992. I hate rosy views of the past. They both fuel reactionaries and cause us to lose track of the actual progress we've made.
And yet? I feel Nostalgic. I have the advantage of Enshitification making it so I can in fact actually say that a lot of things were better when I was younger, but I wish to reject that. I wish to interrogate my sense of loss and really try to judge if I'm actually missing something good. I'm starting off easy, with The Simpsons. I have wanted to go through every episode of the Simpsons for a while, but when I went to watch them on Disney+ it all felt hollow. I realized later that it was part of my general growing dissatisfaction with streaming and how I enjoy the Simpsons in the first place. The episodes are just the episodes and they didn't even do that right at first, with the rather famous problem of them stretching to widescreen a show that makes use of every inch of the frame. The first season was especially bad as it made some episodes nauseating to watch because of how they were framed. They've fixed this, but I maintain this is still not the true experience.
See, the Simpsons had a lot of bonus features in all their DVDs. Deleted scenes, behind the scenes animation, commercials and audio commentaries. The Audio commentaries are among the best out there, with a good glimpse into how the shows are made, what inspired the creators, humorous banter between them and Mike Reiss telling you that The Simpsons was the first use of still images moving in rapid succession to trick your brain into a perception of motion. That joke will become funnier, I swear, but the gist here is that I absolutely enjoyed the Audio Commentaries the entire time I owned the original episodes and I missed their absence. They didn't have to be missing, before they were bought out, FXX had streaming editions of the Simpsons complete with the audio commentaries. All it is, is a separate audio track to go along with all the dubs and they are either unable to or don't care about including them.
I have been getting back into owning physical copies of media again recently, and so I have been rebuying seasons of the Simpsons (long story). I have to find used copies since the stock of new copies is so low, but I've been slowly rebuilding them and god I never knew how much I missed this. Yeah, its inconvenient and takes up space, and any attempt to try to say how much I like it is going to make me sound old as shit, but I like it. And I'm old as shit.
But boy, that's a really rambling way to actually describe what I'm doing isn't it? I have not been very productive for a while, because of stress and injury. I've really let myself go even further from where I was during the pandemic, and I've been feeling depressed because of my age. I transitioned "late" into life, I missed years of my life due to COVID and I broke my back at the start of the year. I feel I missed out on a lot of my life before "old age" hit. As part of my rehabilitation into a more functional human, I want to become more productive again and write more. So I am starting with The Simpsons' again, where my love of comedy and media began when my biological mom showed me my first episode on May 9, 1991. I'm going to be reviewing both the episodes and the DVDs, as well as commenting on how well they hold up because hoo boy, while the comedy generally works there is some STUFF in these. I hope everyone will enjoy, even if its a bit silly and self-indulgent.
Episode capsules/reviews will start soon, but first, lets come up with a very loose set of categories!