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blotthis  and i have been talking about the lovely genre of trashmanga: stories that aren't good, exactly, but that's their virtue. they don't need you to spend emotional energy on them. quoting sophieblot, "i dont feel strongly about this media. im just reading it." their very good post is here

here are some faves:

omniscient reader's viewpoint

guy-gets-sucked-into-a-novel manhwa! except the "novel" was so unpopular, only the manhwa protag has read it. now, the protag of the manhwa is not the protagonist of the novel—the real protag is some fever-dream mashup of every reincarnating protagonist trope. this book!protag has gone full nihilist ("might as well die and do it all again")

this pretty normal setup is supported by a genuinely good (stupid) sense of humor, and by the fact that instead of, like, saving book!protag's heart or anything, manhwa!protag antagonizes him at every turn. BUT keeps putting book!protag in the position of being unable to kill manhwa!protag, which pisses him off even more. ah, love.

ultimately, a story about two boyfriends who absolutely cannot stand each other. a sort of fruit soju of a comic, it goes down very easy

kuro

this is the only recommendation on this list that is actually good. a young girl lives alone with her cute black cat, who has the normal number of teeth and eyes. it starts as a 1-page-format, cats-are-cute story, but quickly gets into a sort of dark fairytale narrative. i really adore the art (and steal its motifs often).

slime datta ken

classic isekai. an urban planner gets reincarnated (as a slime! it's in the title) and builds a fantasy society with his videogame stat-based skills and love of urban and environmental policy. extremely dumb. palatable.

i'm really not the demon god's lackey

an academic folklorist with a terrible personality makes a deal with a devil to be able to read all the books he wants. he gets sent to an ever-changing bookstore in a fantasy city. there's a whole eldrich dark fantasy conflict playing out between werewolves and dark magicians and stuff! he doesn't notice.

his goal is: use skillful selling methods (petty and self-defeating confidence scams) and deep psychology (facile pop-psych out of self-help books) to charm customers, sell books and win favors. and then at the end of the day, tell himself how good of a person he is.

this works out well for everyone, because his stupid pop-psych is juuuust flimsy enough to be interpreted as deep insights into the secret, ghastly nature of the universe! he gets a reputation as some masterful hermit, which in turn reinforces his dedication to doing horrible pop-psych on everyone who comes through his door. everyone here is unbelievably stupid. i'm so charmed.

eventually the demon comes back around and is like, at this point you don't even gotta pay me, you're doing just fine with this (serving my dark needs) (it is implied).

the downside is that i don't care about the non-bookstore magical conflict bits at all, and they go on way too long. and it's fundamentally a one-joke manhua, but gosh does that joke work for me.

peerless dad (later called father unrivaled)

imagine a martial arts manhwa. good job you've got this whole story down!

the protag is a recently-widowed mercenary who needs to provide for his three adorable kids.  his former master has imparted to him two things: first, the (extremely wise) advice "don't you FUCKING get involved with the world of real martial artists, they'll mop the floor with you" and secondly the ability to take an entire beating without dying.

so, he finds the cushiest job possible: gate guard at a martial arts school. certainly he will never get sucked in to the world of martial artists.

the story is a totally ordinary, competent wuxia drama. EXCEPT every plot beat is bookended by the protag thinking "i'm doing it... for my kids. because i'm a Dad." there are demonic cults with beautiful masters, wuxia medicine, qi-based combat. the kids are cute. i liked it.


the villainess reverses the hourglass

it's a straightforward and mean revenge story. a classic villainess (high society, adopted, garish taste, cruel to everyone) is getting killed for her various crimes. at the moment of her death, her sister tells her that the villainess' whole horrible life has been authored by the sister. the villainess gets to reincarnate in order to enact a long and meticulous revenge.

as you read, you slowly understand: people are cruel for stupid and pedestrian reasons. and cruelty is so often brought on by environment, or is reflexive, or is a mechanism of exercising some form of control when you're powerless.

and this manhwa does not give a shit about that. it keeps going with absolutely no reflection on anything. the protagonist, with her time-loop knowledge, is able to orchestrate far crueler acts to people who really haven't done anything yet, loop-wise. what the reader is supposed to think about this is basically irrelevant. there is no moral, no dig-two-gravesesness, no introspection on the kinds of self-inflicted harm that being the protag of a revenge story might do to someone. it's a revenge story, so it goes and does the thing. forever.

i found this oddly moving. certainly it's full of some kind of feeling. it's a favorite of mine. i would not call it "fun" or "good." just full of something

kumo desu ga, nanika?

a girl gets reincarnated as a spider and goes on a little video game spiderventure to level up. it's fine, it's cute. the protag is charming and has a million cute spiderexpressions. this is the least annoying live-life-as-a-videogame manga i feel

sakurada reset (hard to find the other chapters...)

cute manga about a bunch of very anime teens with trivial psychic powers. it's all about combining their powers in interesting ways to solve highschool-level crimes

nobunaga no chef

a skilled chef gets sent back in time to nobunaga, who appreciates his mysterious cooking! it's pretty similar to the other nobunaga one. more serious in tone, but no less silly in concept

a movie about a shithead director who, on the 40-somethingth take of his low-budget zombie film (which is, auteur-ly, shot in a single cut), decides that his actors aren't expressing enough fear. so naturally he wakes the WWII-era zombies that haunt their on-site film location to film their reactions.

that's not really what the movie is about. in fact, it's not exactly a horror movie.

it's in one of my favorite genres of all time, which is: an X about X made by people who love X. in this case, a film about film made by people who love film sooooo much.

it's almost iyashi, a "healing" or feel-good movie. like godzilla minus one is ultimately a feel-good story.

it's a touch trite, because iyashi stuff always is, but still: it's so cute. it's really sweet, and it's a movie that feeds you information in exactly the right order to pay off its own cute concept.

something to watch with other people so you can laugh together.

my friend nyx watched a documentary about east bay punk and wanted my recommendations for ska punk songs. these are the songs that i like and find historically interesting AND think nyx probably hadn't heard. (superman by goldfinger is a great song and is historic in its own way and you know it already, right. the bosstones? love them. you've heard em. you get it.)

julia or janice if you're reading this, fellow ska likers, please lmk what i missed!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2dJ5rcCZx94hXnHlCM7d6a?si=61b290b2bb5e4311

WE WILL FALL TOGETHER
streetlight is my favorite ska band. this isn't even their best song, but GOD. WHAT A SONG. you can tell that toh kay has been composing his band's horn lines by voice, they're so singable. horns are irresistible. gosh can you have a horn section that is so together and so not-together at the same time. music.

people call streetlight fourth wave ska, a title that the lead singer likes about as much as gerard way likes being in an emo band. we'll get back to 'em later

SHE GOT ARRESTED
i started listening to the interrupters literally just for this playlist and THEY'RE GOOD. man, matt freeman would be jealous to play this bassline. you ever hear a band doing a kind of music, right, this 2010s band is signaling that they're doing ska. "ah, cute, they're playing a ska style song," i think before the bass comes in and then i go oh fuck they're playing ska

also hey washington mentioned!! spokane doesn't have a lot to recommend it, but it seems like it'd be a great place to allegedly murder your spouse.

TIME BOMB
and out comes the wolves, listen. put your drink down and listen to me. this is a new take that's never been heard before. and out comes the wolves is a good album. no one has said this before me. this is the first time you've heard this opinion!! thanks. now you can leave this dive bar with new information

the oakland band operation ivy was the first (many people are mad about this statement) ska punk band. they did one album and split. by many accounts they split for for normal nineteen-year-old-punk-bandmate reasons, everyone was nineteen-years-old mad but no one was BIG mad. they each went on to their futures, the lead singer to a career of "being a pretty chill and normal guy" and the rest of them to being "musicians" in bands such as these guys, rancid, which along with green day (and others, ok, i know i know) was responsible for people liking punk in the 1990s.

UNITY
oh hey it's those guys! it's op ivy. you've heard all about them

MY GIRLFRIEND'S ON DRUGS
my barber told me about big d. hi eric!! (he has never been online in his life)
this song is so fun. if you go to the spotify radio for this song you'll eventually get to the dead milkmen's "punk rock girl," which is the correct way of understanding this song—a sort of punk rock nursery rhyme. but god, the horn line!

(SK)A PUNK
jeff rosenstock has the platonic ideal punk voice. what a blessing this cover is, especially with jer on EVERY other instrument. jeff rosenstock's band is bomb the music industry (& others) which have SO many songs that would have been more sincere and historic includes in this list except damnnnnn does jeff sound perfect on this

HERE'S TO LIFE
this isn't streetlight manifesto. it isn't (it is). do you know the willpower it took to keep catch22 off this list? but i'm so enamored with the concept of "acoustic ska" and with this song. come back once point/counterpoint hits, and you'll find all the same streetlight tasting notes.

i don't know much but i do know this / with a golden heart comes a rebel fist / and every single soldier wasn't fired: some have quit

BEER
reel big fish is a group of frat boys who sing about wanting to die using the only kind of speech they know.

LAST ONE OUT OF LIBERTY CITY
i could have replaced this whole playlist with the entirety of EITHER of less than jake's this-era albums, rockview or losing streak. they sum it up. this is the thing! this is it. this is what ska punk is doing.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS
i've just included this so you can hear it.

SUPER RAD
i am skanking. see??
aquabats. they have a song called "shark fighter," where the lyrics are "i'm a shark fighter. i fight sharks. i fight them in the water, because that's where they are." on tiktok there's a guy who danced to this song (not the shark one) on the occasion of henry kissenger's death.

a "comedy" ska band but, ah, are they? comedy is a slippery thing. they're not funny so much as they are... distilled essence of college radio. ska is, famously, "what plays in the head of a thirteen year old boy when he gets extra mozzarella sticks" and aquabats is that. pass the marinara.

(the music video for this is clearly a joke about the song "we are number one from" from kids' show lazytown. it's just a quirk of fate that lazytown came out 10 years later)

KNOWLEDGE
my favorite op ivy song. this is not ska; this is proof that op ivy was a fucking great punk band.

POINT/COUNTERPOINT
a perfect song. unsurprising for streetlight, who have several albums of these fuckers.

it's got all the streetlight highlights! literary reference. some damned clever songwriting. fitting as many words as you possibly can into a single breath. singable horn lines. a fundamentally young-person's understanding of reality, angry and naive and sincere. toh kay just sort of says the thing he means. i love it

in fact a perfect song in an album of perfect songs that, in their entirety, is even better than any one song? (an album about one of my favorite topics which is, spoilers for the album, wanting to kill yourself and in the same thought desperately wanting your friends to not kill themselves). the real point/counterpoint is between this, "a better place", and "a moment of violence." you don't gotta listen to the album but know there's a Structure here, okay.

NEW GIRL
the mandatory inclusion from tony hawk's pro skater. thankfully, it's a bop! a perfect punk song; it's almost a lucky accident that it's ska.

thanks for listening!

i read (via google translate) an article about the five spiciest regional dishes of indonesia and malaysia. now i don't know if they're the spiciest, but they do look good as hell. armed with youtube and google translate, here are my recipe notes.

plecing kangkung khas lombok
(lombok-style water spinach)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvShDN4CdsU at home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVSBUiz-zYU street food

blanch water spinch and mung bean sprouts

grate coconut

sambal:
blanch tomatoes and merah+rawit chilis, grind with fried peanuts, fried terasi shrimp paste, sugar, salt, makrut lime

top water spinach with sprouts, coconut, and sambal

mie aceh
(aceh-province noodles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGtn3u23Yjw homemade mie aceh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCgfFacXVM street-style mie aceh

the spice paste is made of tons of merah chilis, fried garlic, fried shallots, fried head-on shrimp, fried peanuts, and (not mentioned) maybe ginger. added later are coriander seed, poppy seed, cardamon, palm sugar, and "assorted spices" (i have no idea). this all is oil-fried until pretty dry.

beef broth is: round onion, garlic, shallot, lemongrass, tomato, daun salam leaf, green onion, carrot optional

for the dish itself, crab (or squit, or shrimp), beef (or lamb), straw mushroom, tomato, green onion, cauliflower, and spice paste. fried, and then with beef broth, salty (aka light chinese style) soy sauce, sugar, salt and msg added. then the noodles are chinese-indonesian style mie. the garnishes are wild celery leaves, cucumber, krupuk crackers, lime, vinegar-pickled shallots

bebek betutu
(balinese spiced roast duck)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scZ7GH2x1jQ traditional bebek betutu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzTYB-8bW10 modern-kitchen bebek betutu

i really like this guy's cooking show.

divide the chicken, salt it, and cover with makrut lime juice

roast coriander, cumin, nutmeg, and cloves then grind

make betutu seasoning:
dried merah chilis, fresh merah chilis, fresh rawit chilis, garlic, shallots, candlenuts, ginger, galangal, fresh tumeric, lemongrass, fried terasi shrimp paste, lime leaves, salt, black pepper (or maybe long pepper?)

pound that all together

coat the chicken in betutu seasoning, sprinkle with spice mix, and either:

steam in banana leaves in a pit oven (traditional)
boil in water til the water's reduced (modern), season with palm sugar (i might put the sugar in the the betutu seasoning instead)

serve with fried peanuts

oseng-oseng mercon
(1990s yogakarta city firecracker beef)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7dYCN6Qv9c streetfood-style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZu_mKdczag home style
https://www.cookmeindonesian.com/oseng-oseng-mercon-yogyakarta-firecracker-beef/ history

pound shallot, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, ginger, daun salam leaf, lime leaf, merah+rawit chilis, salt, palm sugar

blanch beef shin and tendon, simmer with spices until soft

Tumis tulang jambal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vFaPdhSyPM

soak saltfish bones, fry

fry up a rough dice of:

shallots, garlic, chilis (merah and rawit, plus some kind of green pepper i don't know), tomato, daun salam leaf, lime leaf, ginger, galangal, oyster sauce, kecap manis, sugar, msg

add the saltfish bones, some stinkbean (yes that's real), water to cover, and boil

i entered a contest for tool-assisted speedruns in majora's mask! (tool-assisted meaning that you play the game frame-by-frame, looking at the game's memory values and doing (you hope) the best possible inputs on every frame)


because it's me my entry was extremely meets-the-letter-of-the-rules-but-not-the-spirit and got disqualified (you have to do a task in the game? why not simply use glitches to set the memory values of the game to show that the task has already been done? why not??), but they gave it a nice detailed explanation :) also the top three entries are wildly impressive. especially because the 3rd place person started playing majora's mask only one month ago. damn


(also i'm embarrassed that i skipped 1/3rd of the whole dang task and didn't make top 3. yes i knew about the a-slide-into-weirdshot but tasing takes fucking forever)


https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2167790800

really, where do salads come from?

"what are we having for dinner tonight" you ask, and i answer "boeuf bourguignon," and we're pretty clear on where that dish came from. and we can get plenty more particular than "france."


we can't get so specific, but have a pretty good idea. it's from paris in the late 1800s, probably a bistro invention, not from burgundy but marketed using the burgundian reputation for good meat and wine. personally I feel fine about that answer. good enough for me! the general rule is: foods we call "traditional" are about seventy years old when they reach "traditional" status, and were invented by some cook with a good marketing sense.


(it would have been totally normal, for instance, for your italian mother AND grandmother to have never heard of ciabatta growing up; let alone tiramisu. and when i was a kid having instant ramen for the first time, plenty of working japanese chefs probably still regarded it as a new fad.)


but where is salad from? what kind of cuisine is it? we can trace the provenance of pasta, lagh'mon, and soba, but where in hell is salad from. is it french food? italian? salad is just kind of there.


it's roman food. that's rare! we almost never encounter roman food in our day-to-day lives. the closest might be "we also drink wine and eat bread" and "we also use fish sauce" but that's convergent evolution (bread and wine were made thousands of years before rome; fish sauce developed independently in a number of places), not the influence of rome on our diet.


salad is one of those uncommon foods that has a single unbroken lineage from rome to us. apicius was writing down very modern-sounding vinaigrettes with honey and olive oil. our word "salad" is from vulgar roman "herba salata," salted herbs.


and when the roman empire split people just kept making salads. wherever there had been romans, people made salads to their local taste. in the latin west salads were sort of relegated to fast days, but in the byzantine empire they never lost a minute (the things that became fattoush! greek salad!), and in medieval spain and renaissance italy salads were back to full popularity.


these days we have regionalisms—salade niçoise, ceasar salad, waldorf salad—but mostly, when you eat salad, you're eating roman food.