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My last bureocratic fight with my university has been brought to an end. Finally, I'm done. Free! My shackles have been broken and the cage gates have opened etc etc. I'm also stoked about the fact that the document which confirms I'm done with university lists the year I started uni as 2019/2020 because that's when I swapped from a dual degree to a single degree so it doesn't seem like I've been studying for a literal eternity, which essentially, I have been.
The aforementioned bureocratic fight really was that, a 3 week long back and forth between me and many departments of my university, with them having once again (as a goodbye gift, I suppose) displaced my important documents I e-mailed them. It's like they're desperate to keep me there, stuck inside their damp walls and long halls... I imagine most of the assistants and professors aren't there by choice, instead they're eternal students that haven't managed to get out in time so now they're stuck, becoming one with the faculty. If you happen to wander too deep into the basement the walls suddenly turn fleshy and a disjointed voice starts to appear out of nowhere... "What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to a mind? Our unity is full of wonder, which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive." Sounds like I should play system shock 2 again and submit to the biomass...
Anyway wooo I'm glad that's over with! In other news, I forgot to mention I finally got a vertical labret in my last entry!!! It's been over a week now and it's healing well. I think it suits me so much better than the nostril piercing (rip in peace). I mean, the nostril looked great too, but this one really just fits my face so well, I was actually stunned once I got pierced because I didn't think it would look that good! I do suffer a bit from chronic long face (if I were a dog I'd be a rough collie t. multiple people in my life) so I thought the verticality of the piercing would exaggarate it maybe, but it turned out so cool. The actual piercing experience was extremely painless, which was yet another surprise. I remember experiencing heat and burning after my nostril, but for this one? Just a slight pinching sensation like pinching your lip with your nails, combined with the feeling of a needle going through your flesh, aka I had vaccines and blood draws that hurt more than this.
Why does time pass so fast, it's already been two weeks since my last entry yet I feel like it was yesterday... I watched the sequel to Pearl yesterday. It was.. hmm... I actually found it pretty hilarious in a ridiculous way but you bet me and my sister were skipping the porn scenes that were longer than necessary. I did however really enjoy the little sub plot with Jenna Ortega and her bf - him being an artsy cameraman that wants to film an avantgarde porno and her being a church girl prude. Throughout the movie all the porn actors and the producer keep berating her and poking fun of her prudishness with her bf never really stepping in to say anything, as if he, you know, agrees with them... But then when she expresses interest in "acting" her bf suddenly gets extremely defensive over her being sullied by these dirty porn actors because she's so pure. Idk really riveting stuff and I'm glad he got his retribution lmao. I feel like the movie pokes fun at men that consume porn but think so high of themselves when compared to the porn stars they just literally jacked off to. Or even better, pretentious film bros that sit on a high horse because their artsy porn is way better and has more value than regular porn just because it's filmed in a different way. Idk funny shit.
I went to an anime convention this weekend. Sadly my only weeb friend had an important wedding to attend so I went alone. As a result, I spent most of my time there people watching and I noticed so many interesting things. First of all, there's a stark, and I'm saying STARK generational divide between weebs here. There's, I would say, 3 groups of ages you could see at the convention. First beeing teens up until around 21-22 years old. Second group is where I'd put myself, 22-35, and the third group is the rarest because being an anime fan was no doubt pretty rare here in the late 90's and really early 2000's so it's everyone older than 37 or so. The second group is actually the group of people that started organizing this convention a decade ago, and they're still in charge today. I want to focus on the youngest group because holy shit, they're so much different.
Most important difference lies within the social media everyone hates (loves?), TikTok. It's not a matter of whether we use it or not, but how we use it, which is drastically different. These kids use TikTok not only to follow irl and local people and businesses - but they also get a lot of their weeby knowledge from it too??? Maybe I'm the outlier but I do everything to hide my account from people I might know and these people even meet up because of TikTok, and attach their names to it. Crazy!!! In fact, most of the conversations I overheard somehow led back to TikTok every time. "Oh I saw your cosplays on TikTok", "omg I saw this keychain of a green haired anime character with boots on tiktok and I really wanted to buy it even though I didn't watch the anime", "I follow your edits on tiktok" etc etc. I mean, I know TikTok is big but I had no idea how important it was in this young local weeb community. Like, I don't know any of these people but their follows and views are absolutely not small at all! And all of the vendors had a massive presence on it as well, to the point where their only social media where they advertise was tiktok (or a much less popular instagram page) so I didn't even manage to find out who would be on the convention until the day of, because I just don't use TikTok in that way. When I went to the first convention there was basically no social media presence at all, like, 0. I find this super strange because how do you organize through TikTok and form communities through it? I'm going to sound like a boomer but Facebook is way better for like.. actual community organization.. no?
Next thing I noticed was like.. almost a class difference. Most of these young weebs can afford so much more compared to what my generation could and if you go to their social media you'll see such a wide variety of cosplays and crazy displays of consumerism. With my allowance I only managed to amass like... maybe 20 volumes of manga in my teens and like one figurine? Cosplays, even cheap ebay (at that time) shit, were definitely out of my reach... The weebs are getting gentrified! They're all richer, they're all OBSESSED with the western (cough american cough)... zeitgeist I guess, to the point some of them are going to introduce themselves by saying "my pronouns are he/him" in english instead of our native language despite our native language also having pronouns? I mean I know exactly why, saying it in our native language just sounds extremely cringe (because it is). Oh and it's actually all girls doing this pronoun stuff irl which I thought was interesting. A lot of them extremely tiny, for some reason, despite the average female height being 168cm here. What's up with that?
I think my generation of weebs is also a lot more different due to being more irony poisoned. A lot of us still kind of hide our weebdom outside the appropriate spaces and it's pretty obvious. Being into anime in the same loud way these teens are now would have gotten you bullied in high school for sure, especially if you're a dude. Unless you're lucky enough to have a group of weeby dude friends in which case you'd probably have a grand time. Anyway, definitely a larger percentage of my gen falls into the self hating weeb cliche, which doesn't really surprise me at all. But the older we get the freer from it we are I think. Still, if someone not into anime talks to me about it over a beer, you bet I'm going to shit on it for a long while before actually revealing my tastes... Yeah I'm guilty of it too.
Anyway, I got out from this convention with a 12 Kingdoms artbook in my hand, which I got for a surprisingly good deal. I bought it from the vendor I thought to be the most interesting - the lady there mostly sold manga in Japanese or German (signifying her being a first gen weeb, since they mostly got their manga from germany/austria in the past) and most of it was shoujo, which, based! She also sold a lot of keychains and stuff from more generic and popular anime but it was her manga/magazine collection that really intrigued me. She also cracked me up while describing some k-pop merch to teens, describing 2nd gen kpop as old groups since the girlies were not aware of shinee and big bang at all... What a shock, honestly. Also I noticed this trend of vendors having to include mandatory kweer merch to sell, which wasn't a thing here at all in the past. Interesting to see trends change here, gender fandom being connected to weebdom was basically an unknown concept pre tiktok here... Despite it being big on tumblr at the time. In fact I saw this much earlier in my husbands country in 2016. I guess we fought it off for longer but gender consoomerism had to reach eventually. I mean, how will you survive without a greyromantic pin? People might think you're a boring straightie, but like, you're soooooo much different!!!!
I also went to a few panels and... that's that. The day before I went to a gig with my friends so I was super tired and a teeny bit hungover so I took my leave early because I wanted to make it to the 7pm train. All in all I'm glad I went because this felt like a massive culture shock to me due to not actually attending this convention since the first time it was organized.