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Man it's already the 11th, December is flying by too quickly... And I'm in a special ranty mood this month! Must be all the holiday joy in the air that's making me feel extra embittered? But seriously, I haven't felt bothered for the majority of this year... It's time to let some steam off I guess!
SO.... the other day... I was looking for my nightly video to watch before sleep. I usually listen to either VWestlife, one of my favourite youtube channels ever that youtube seems to HATE reccomending so every day I have to go into his channel, or Technology Connections. Something on the top of my reccomended list caught my eye instead - I saw a grainy early 2000s digital camera video of a young girl clearly cosplaying as a teen from the early/mid 2000's. She even has a page on neocities! And all I could think of was... how... weirdly... manufactured? I'm sorry!!!! You just have a face of a girl that grew up in the late 2010's! The carefully placed camcorder, the CRT's, the zebra print pillows... Ah and despite this #oldwebcore setting, she has a discord server for her fans (consisted of mostly 4channers, both adult and underage, even though she's 15). Sigh... At least stay committed to the larp!!! Every y2k oldweb online fanatic leads back to discord... the most popular modern platform for terminally online teens you could think of. Not even judging, I'm a part of the problem too! I have to say I'm fascinated by the way in which younger gens emulate earlier decades. This isn't strictly a 2000's thing, but you see it most with early 2000's because everyone thirsts after the era right before they were born. As a teen, I really liked a lot of media dating to the early 90's (mostly music), but instead of turning my whole personality and looks into a freaky amalgamation of all early 90's stereotypes to show just how big of an early 90's fan I am I just... listened to the music? The thought that I was enamored with the early 90's actually never even crossed my mind lmao. And no kid around me acted this way either, I wasn't special. Now though, you'll see scenecore girlies decked out in - not just scene fashion - but also elements of fashion scene girls from 2009 would have found slutty because scene girls were catty and edgy nlogs, there I said it!! Yeah sure, you can find pictures of scene girls in fishnets and really small miniskirts but your AVERAGE scene girl didn't dress like that, it was mostly just skinny jeans, hoodies and the teased hair with racoon eyes. But now you have to be the most accurate and mythical version of a scene girl, decked out in the biggest amount of accessories. Everything is like... amplified? Caricatured? I don't want this to sound like a "kids these days are doing things WRONG" because no, there's nothing particularly wrong (it just feel like sacrilege to those of us that lived through those eras!) about the way they're approaching nostalgia for a world they'll never be able to experience, we've all been there done that. However, it's just genuinely interesting that this online overload of information about subcultures of old really doesn't mean jack shit if you have no context for it. So in turn it ends up with everyone becoming a chimera of a decade, instead of a kid being into the xyz subculture. Besides, being into a decade isn't even a subculture. What is it? An aesthetic? I guess. You can't just be into retro games, you also have to be into looking like a kid that played these games when they weren't retro (but the look ALWAYS has to be attractive and a bit yassified weirdly enough, you need to look marketable, have the right amount of eye pencil smeared under your eyes, your hair has to look perfectly unkempt etc.), oh but also your room has to look the part as well, oh but also you need to have a personal website to complete the look, oh but also... It's all about performance. Surface level yeah she has a website, a spacehey (that has a whole windows xp look to itself - something nobody actually did on myspace when it was a thing), but instead of using these to communicate with her fans - she uses discord! You get me? It's a sin everyone that's into emulating the oldweb commits - this is definitely not unique to her. Anyway, this aforementioned information overload was unavailable to me when I was 13 - so I didn't turn into what this girl is doing. I couldn't observe how your average early 90's teen acted, dressed and talked in as much detail as kids today can so I didn't feel as removed from them in a sense? Anyway, no hate to this young girl, I am certain that over time her presentation will become more genuine, but as long as she keeps doing this her main audience will be thirsty 4channers that love the larp because she's cute and she looks like the more ideal version of a girl they were into in middle school. I wish you the best, and to get your face off social media while you can, and actually enjoy your hobbies to the fullest. Oh also someone in her circlejerk discord said "her neocities looks like a woman who had a scene/fujo and/or /b/tard/tumblr phase in 2008-2012 made it, pretty zased" which is the most untrue and innacurate thing ever. Her page is just a generic late 90's/early 2000's fire and skull gifs type of site. You know the one. Fujo and /b/tard literally where? You damn philistines. But I'm sure you can extract from this post what type of audience she attracts, which is rather unfortunate lmao. Her site exploded 3 days ago btw, it got a ton of visits, and it will probably bring the next influx of newfags into neocities. Which might be fun... I didn't want this to turn into a ZOOMERS DON'T KNOW ANYTHING AND ARE OBSESSED WITH AESTHETICS rant I swear, I'm a very old zoomie myself... But god am I tired of... this... fake nostalgia? Idk what to call it anymore!!!
Another funny update regarding goSuperModel, they decided not to celebrate Sinterklaas because of its problematic history, despite having celebrated it on the site in the past. This is so ridiculous... Celebrating a pedo prophet religion is totally cool though!!! Christ I hate this stupid site, I hate woke northern euros. Why not celebrate the slavic/balkans version of the holiday that doesn't feature the blackface at all? Oh right, we're not as relevant as muslims or BIPOC so we're not interesting DESPITE BEING YOUR NEIGHBOURS. You can't gather as many woke brownie points for celebrating our culture!!! FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK this site. FUCKKKKKKKK virtue signalling. I've been reading about some community woes regarding the mobile dressup game I'm playing now, and I totally understand why people fall so hard for gachas, spending a ton of money on energy refreshing etc. They have 0 patience, when these games are made to be short time wasters! For example, people are complaining a ton that the requirements (basically daily roadblocks that don't allow you to progress the story too far) for the chapters are too hard because you spend a day or two grinding for them, but... what do they mean by "too hard". It's not hard, it just takes a while? It really confuses me, just put your phone down when the limit is reached... It's not like the gains from the story are so amazing you're rushing to get them, at least not in my case. I'm also in awe of whales spending so much on pulls to complete these gacha sets. And I learned a new term, "dolphin", someone that spends less than a whale lmao. So funny because my whole life I've only been hearing of whales, especially in mmos that I played. So I guess this appeared with the advent of mobile gacha games? Interesting! Oh my goddd this is so silly... Anyway... I haven't been concerned with my weight for the majority of my life since I was blessed with being tall and a fast metabolism, but my 20's weren't so kind. Around my wedding, I really got a bit chunky! I mean, my bmi was in the higher normal range, but my weight distribution is absolutely wack... I gained weight mostly in my thighs/ass and arms, and my mid section only got wider, I don't really have a tummy. So I just looked really BIG to myself and nobody else, because it seems everyones measurement for "you gained weight" is having a flabby stomach, meanwhile I'm looking at a picture of me lying on the floor with my grandmas cat and my arm is almost as wide as my head (it's pressed on my body, but still). I felt bloated all the time too. Partially, I think the reason behind my weight gain was birth control, which I stopped taking completely. I think once that totally got out of the system, I slowly started going back to my usual weight? Also with the stress of uni being gone, I immediately dropped a few kgs. So now I hit the weight I had when I was 18 yeahhhhh feels good. Really I didn't change much about my diet besides snacking a bit less. I still get bombarded with cakes from my grandma every now and then, and I eat a bit of sweet after lunch and dinner, but I tried to eliminate those afternoon cravings that I think were also contributing to my weight gain... Anyway, all is good now, I can safely go into christmas cake overload without feeling guilty, I finally have some breathing room. Oh and I went back to my lazy 20 minute daily exercising that I haven't been doing regularly for the past two years now!!! It seems I did change a lot of things about my lifestyle, seems like it all stacked up. I'm glad it did!!!
My husband bought Persona 5, and since he never really played Persona games (besides me making him play p3 a few years ago but he never finished it!) I'm basically playing it for him lmao. It's actually not that bad, I'm not sure why I had such an aversion to this game for the longest time. One complaint is that it's actually too big at times - like there's too many things you can do. For someone that didn't play persona games before it might seem like there's too much going on too early? Maybe that's just me. Also, while Morgana is less annoying than Teddie, it's kind of annoying how he's always with you. This is such a silly complaint but for example you gotta study for the exams right? You have to get your knowledge up higher to get a higher score too, but what's the point if you have a cat with you that tells you all the answers anyway lmao. Narratively, it makes no sense! Basically I feel like Morgana kind of minimizes the protagonist, even more so than P4 did. P3 did this right, feels way better to just be on your own most of the time and have some agency, and only have the creepy guide character appear here or there (and be the Kaworu to your Shinji...). Lastly, I'm kind of salty they changed social links to confidants. I get that it sounds a bit more serious but I like consistency... Ah and I almost forgot, costumes changing the battle music is so fun!!! LIVE THIS BODY MANLY... no wait.. how does the p1 theme go again? Doesn't matter, IT'S THE BEST ONE. Such a throwback to 2012 when I played it on my psp...
In other news, I have committed a grave sin. I'm playing a MOBILE dressup game.... A chinese gacha at that..... Well all mobile games are gachas at this point. And on top of it all. It's just a KNOCKOFF of Shining Nikki, which I heard became pretty p2w. With the strong willpower handed to me by enduring the worst of the worst - korean lootboxes - I am managing not to spend any money. Besides the membership. Hehe. I don't mind spending about 10-15€ a month on dressup games (tbh its the only money I'm spending on games at all...), but recently goSuperModel fell off so hard for me I literally don't even want to give them money. First of all - an inclusivity team (that seems to be going nowhere)? What a joke. Second of all, why does a dressup game need to be the wokest of the woke places on the Internet? I log in to have fun and dress my little model up, and instead I get FREE PALESTINE scarves from a code, DISABILITY AWARENESS~~ events, 10 times a year there's some kind of a trans related day/week/month/quarter that you have to commemorate etc etc. And it's all so performative. Their site is incredibly archaic which obviously implies it's definitely not perfectly accessible for the DISABLEDS they're telling us about, they're greedy as hell while they only have one or two decent designers but this is a north europe based site so of course buying a shirt that consists of 50 pixels should cost you as much as a shirt costs irl (but they're all commies of course!) and so on and so forth. FUCKKKKKK this. Can you believe an advent calendar in this game costs TWENTY FOUR EUROS, and the gifts are absolute shite??? Meanwhile compare it to this chinese overlords game where you pay 12 euros for a 90day lasting event with rewards that are super worthwhile, game economy wise. So anyway, the game I'm playing is Life Makeover lmao. I swear I've seen scammy ads of this game before, but what got me to play weren't the ads, instead a friend from a discord server I'm in posted screeshots of her character and outfits and I thought they were really adorable... Imagine all that insanely detailed and high poly korean alpha cc for the sims 4 that never seems to fit the game - well that's how this game looks like, but even cuter. Imo it kind of does suffer from modern, soulless anime (well, manhua) art overdesign, but sometimes it hits the right spots for me. I do prefer the faces/makeup and overall aesthetic to SN and LN. It runs in UE4 and it takes up 20GB of my phone storage lmao. The TEXTURES and DETAILS are so satisfying to look at. It has about 50 different currencies, your usual energy and ally system, but you can create multiple characters that share one wardrobe, take pictures, there's even a sims-like house building system. The only thing that's missing is this sense of community that I long for in dressup games. Talking in global chat eats up your vitality points which is a waste considering you can swap vitality for gold... And also the english playerbase doesn't seem THAT huge outside of the game. Also it would appear I made my character on a barely english speaking server which was my mistake but whatever. The playerbase itself is 99% women and the conversations in the subreddit and discord are chill and only game related which is relaxing to see. I really like observing the trends whenever I start playing a new dressup game. Like for example, popular faces. It seems there's a couple of face types people like to go for, one of them being a puglike face with a very short midface section, a very sloped nose and really wide eyes. It's similar to that trend in the sims 4 when all gallery sims looked like modern disney characters. Selling my soul to the chinese - all it took was a really cute dressup game. Actually I already had tiktok, they got my soul a long time ago. I thiiiink this interest won't last for too long because of the lack of forums and more community engaging events, but I'll enjoy it while it does...