childlike empress

Author: childlike empress (page 16 of 67)

Appreciation post: Vox Day’s Winestream

What is this??

A classic thumbnail?

Real music?

Impeccable lighting?

A well-framed shot?

Just the tiniest tease of Spacebunny in the intro?

GOOD AUDIO??

The Dark Lord is upping his game, and got himself a YouTube lackey.

I gotta be honest here, this is about the last thing I would have expected from Vox Day. The details are refined. It’s clear that he took time to set up and film it. Everything about it is finished—except I wish that he would have turned the wine label toward the camera at the end so we could have seen it.

There are so many questions in my head right now, but I’ll just say thing: I’m glad to see attention going to refinement and style. A deliberately presented appearance goes a long way toward saying “I’m serious about what I do,” which obviously Vox is.

I’m curious as to how much Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich have influenced Vox as of late, and how much the timing of this has to do with the release of Hoaxed later this week.

Winestream Vox is great. Can’t wait for more, even though I don’t even drink wine.

This is everyone’s reminder that Karl Lagerfeld is a complete troll

2018-10-15 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Fashion people have no sense of humor.

I think that this is related to “women aren’t funny” but also to the fact that fashion is likely full of personalities kindred to Registered Dietitians or Nurses. They know what is approved right now and that definitely isn’t it.

Humor is never “approved” and so fashionistas will never recognize it.

This reminder is brought to us once again by the humorless fashion writers of whatever British newspaper this screenshot is from. I can never tell apart The Guardian or The Times or whatever. (I did my research. It’s The Guardian.)

As far as I can tell, Karl Lagerfeld is still in charge of the design direction at Fendi (which is focused on fur, something that Karl has never compromised). And from the looks of it, Uncle Karl is still up to his old tricks.

I can never decide if I like Karl. He’s somewhere in between “Elitist Fashion Prick” and “Greatest Troll of Our Time.” Sometimes he comes across as so stuck up—but maybe that’s the fairytale that fashion journalists want to weave about him—and yet he can get Fashion People to wear the stupidest stuff.

And some of that stupid stuff is really, really beautiful.

It’s like he’s turned trolling into an art.

Why stop at pink pussyhats and vulgar homemade costumes when you could go luxe, with fox fur and silk? With the further indignity of having paid that much money for it!

Who’s more at fault—the fashion designer who put something together knowing exactly what it looks like, or the fashion girl who buys it anyway?

I would love to get Karl Lagerfeld and Banksy in a room together, honestly. I think they’d have a lot of interesting things to say about art and commerce, and playing to the crowd.

Tonight I didn’t give myself a lot of time to write this post (hello, 10pm bedtime) but I’ll put it on my to-do list to write up a listicle or something of Uncle Karl’s Greatest Hits.

I seem to remember what’s essentially a Wookie suit from sometime circa 2008.

Taking Stock

2018-10-14 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

In this world of data, it can be easy to forget that productivity looks just as much like moss growing on a tree as it does an automobile assembly line.

I tend to forget this.

Forward motion doesn’t need to be strictly linear to be effective. In fact, I would argue from the place that since many successful people have entirely different personality types, “productivity” can look quite different depending on the person doing it.

What matters is that you do the work.

Today I took myself out to breakfast, spent time reading, did laundry, unpacked my kitchen stuff, and attempted to unclog the sink. That’s not nothing.

Was I super-regimented about it? No. Did the stuff need to get done? Yes.

My thinking-centric self needs to remember that other forms of work are equally valid. Not everything needs to be crunching over a desk or curled around a book.

This is why I want to add drawing and art back to my daily routine. I always feel happier when I do this, and yet it terrifies me because I have so much to learn and practice.

One of the hard parts about being an adult is being fully aware of how much you suck at first instead of the childlike “look what I did!” mentality.

So my friends, don’t do what I just did and talk about doing work.

Go and do.

New Rule: 10pm bedtime

2018-10-13 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

If you read this blog at all, you know me. I’m not the most adventurous person you’ll ever meet, but I’m always trying out new ways to live my life. So far on this blog I’ve tried out

Calisthenics (great idea)
Breakfast (not great idea)
Eating only when hungry (weird but fine)
Fish oil supplements (good)
Only eating animal foods (best idea ever)
Journalling (great when I can keep focused)
Blogging every day (holla)

Some of these have truly changed my life. The most recent change was “eating only when hungry.” That somehow transitioned to eating less in general, especially when I was moving house and kind of stressed out. That has kick-started some fat loss for me, so I’m happy about that. For the first time ever, I’ve gone through the trouble of calculating the macros that I’m eating so that I can try to duplicate them for the next several months. It’s 2:1 of protein to fat, if you want to know.

Even with the positive diet changes, though, I’m not feeling my best. I’m pretty sure that’s because I don’t sleep enough.

I’m one of those people with a tendency to just keep going until I physically fall over or fall asleep, so I often stay up late. Naturally, I don’t get a ton accomplished when I’m up that late, but it makes me feel like I’m not missing out on anything (thanks, Extraverted Intuition).

My bedtimes get pushed later and later, which leads to mornings also getting later and later. Now that I have a commute again, this actually means something—I get a worse parking spot.

Sleep deprivation makes me a little more cranky, a little less flexible, and much more distractable. That’s not how I want to live my life.

Something needs to change.

Unlike some people, who if they get up at 5am will go to sleep at 8pm because they’re tired, I just stay up because it doesn’t occur to me to go to bed. I’ve learned how to be productive in the morning, but I’m not much use after 10:30pm no matter what.

With that information I’ve identified bedtime as the key. My new bedtime is 10pm, every day. No exceptions (for now).

No matter how much I’ll hate going to bed “early,” a solid bedtime is the only way I can guarantee for myself a long-enough night of sleep. It’s something I can control, unlike the start and stop times of my job, and that is not unreasonable to do.

My rational brain can’t come up with any arguments against going to bed every night at 10pm. It’s only my irrational brain that is making a fuss about it.

This change will require re-prioritizing how I spend my free time, so it’ll be a little bit rocky at first. But I’m hoping that the refreshment that comes with a solid night of sleep will outweigh any kinks as I figure out a new daily routine.

With that said, it’s coming up on my bedtime so I’ll excuse myself to brush my teeth.

Thank you and goodnight!

Image of the Week: Kanye in the White House

2018-10-12 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Did you think it would be anything else?

I’m glad he’s standing his ground.

I’m done: an incomplete book review of The Fountainhead

2018-10-11 / childlike empress / 1 Comment

I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18. It was a joy to read—never before had I read something that spoke so directly to my soul (Lord of the Rings excepted). I stayed up until 2am reading it during a week that I was teaching at a summer camp. I was enchanted.

(Yes, I realize that is weird to say about a book involving architecture and politics and NYC.)

This summer, I re-read The Fountainhead. While I still greatly enjoyed it, I was less enchanted. Now that I’m older, it’s easier to see the flaws and holes in Ayn Rand’s thinking.

However, I was struck at how much it could have been written today. It’s a book about media and public opinion just as much as it’s about architecture and the “ideal” man. If I were to pair it with another current book as a double-feature, I would put it with Vox Day’s SJWs always Lie. SJWAL lays a groundwork of theory, and TF dramatizes an SJW takeover.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’ll do another post sometime when I’m more awake that talks about the weaknesses in the book.

What (or rather, who) I’m here to talk about is Dominique Francon. I loved her when I was 18 and I was surprised at how much I loved her today. She embodies a solid 1/3 of my own character, someone who is competent, cognizant of the world, but not of it.

In many ways, Dominique embodies the struggle that many of us have—the ability to see beyond what the crowd wants and what the media tells us we should feel, but the compassion and the weakness to try to get other people to understand and think for themselves. Even writing this sentence makes me second guess myself. This blog is a form of shouting into the void. Perhaps it’s futile, but reasoning with a CROWD will never work. You can only reason with individuals.

To punish herself for this greatest of crimes, she decides to degrade herself to the lowest possible depths by utterly obliterating her own Will. Her last act as a free woman is to marry Peter Keating, someone who evokes so many feelings in me that I can’t come up with a pithy description for him. As a man, he’s repulsive—very much seduction along the lines of “I did everything you asked, why don’t you want to jump my bones?”

Dominique lives for years without expressing a Will of her own, or really any desire or personal thought. Such exquisite discipline.

Now, I’m not saying that this is a good way to live. In fact, I think it is an absolutely horrible way to live and that nobody should do it. I firmly believe that the Human Will is one of the most beautiful and powerful things on this earth, and that it is a terrible and tragic event for any human being to submit his or her Will to anything short of God the Father Almighty. That said, I understand Dominique’s reasons for doing so. She was punishing herself.

And so Dominique will stand as my inspiration during the next few months at my day job, during which I will cease to have any opinions of my own. After my post last night and a good talk with a coworker who knows what’s up, I’ve decided that it’s no longer worth it to try to exert any of my Will at my job. I’m done. With a few exceptions* (there are some lines I absolutely will not cross), I will no longer provide any extra value at work. Minimal thinking, minimal creativity, just getting the job done. My boss gets what he wants.

I said so this afternoon, in a conversation. “Whatever you want.” My Ne/Fe picked up on a reaction—he was pleased, like I had finally submitted to his wishes. If that’s what he wants to think, fine. I’m done caring, in the way that I normally care about the work that I do.

I’m going to save all my caring for the work that I do for myself, on my own time. It’s going to become what I labor over in love, not my day job.

During the times when it gets tough to stomach because something is wrong and it would be so easy to fix, I’ll think of Dominique and her resolve at going to bed with a pawing, mumbling half-man every night and hosting high-society parties with not a hair or word out of place.

Some people might call this malicious compliance.

They might be right.

I was wrong

2018-10-10 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Very, very veryvery wrong.

Here’s why.

I have a new job. I probably shouldn’t refer to it as a new job, but it feels new because I’m still not totally sure what it is I’m supposed to do. Ambiguous job descriptions are fun like that.

A while back, I wrote about the lesson that I was about to learn (or so I thought).

Past Me thought she was going to learn a lesson about navigating workplace politics without the benefit of a boss who takes care of his team.

This is not wrong. I’m learning those lessons.

Past Me forgot the fine print. There’s more. The REAL lesson in all of this is learning how to set healthy boundaries around my day job.

I’ve always been the type of person who gets what must be done, done. The rest of it will get done on its own schedule. A lot of this was developed as I learned to go through life with a chronic autoimmune illness. You do what you have to do, and then you collapse on the couch with exhaustion.

However, this philosophy is not helping my goals, dreams, and plans. I would like to spend more time and attention outside of work on the things that I’m interested in, like this blog and business ideas.

The problem is, my day job is branded in my head as a must-do. I assign it more worth than everything else, and the rest of it gets stuffed in around the edges.

This is not a way to build up a side hustle.

Yet a side hustle is what I need if I want to extricate myself from the situation I’m in. You see, the boss at my day job is a micromanager. He keeps everything deliberately ambiguous, so that only he can make decisions. He talks out of one side of his mouth about professional development, and then takes away every actual opportunity for it. Nobody on our team gets any ownership of the work that we do—everything gets his byline and his say-so. His behavior is exceedingly frustrating, especially to someone who just wants to more forward and get things done.

That someone is me. The sucker. Still trying to do a good job.

I like doing a good job at my must-do.

I’m sure you can figure out the problem by now. My focusing on my must-do day job, I’m trapped in a situation where I can’t advance and can’t win. The only way out is to figure out how to focus more on my real callings.

Boundaries. I need boundaries. My challenge is to figure out how to set emotional boundaries around how invested I’ll get in my day job.

I can’t let my boss get to me—that way lies stress and autoimmune madness.

The lesson that I need to learn is how to set healthy boundaries for myself to not get too invested in this job, to not let my boss’s way of doing things (however inexplicable) make a difference in my life.

That should free up some space in my brain to work more on Batfort and other endeavors. Which are way more fun and could actually yield some good rewards.

Anyway. Boundaries.

Why REGULAR is wrong for NCT 127

2018-10-09 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Maybe this should be titled “Why ‘Regular’ rubs me the wrong way.” Something about it doesn’t sit right with me, like I’m watching my kids grow up and start hanging out with questionable friends.

To understand why, let’s go on a quick tour of NCT 127’s title tracks.

Firetruck

Rumor has it, Taeyong’s childhood dream was to become a firefighter. With “Firetruck,” SM Entertainment made that happen, in a sense. It’s a club-type dance song, with a fire fighter theme, but it’s difficult to believe that the theme was pure coincidence considering that Taeyong trained with SM for so long, and he’s one of the rappers that they’re actively encouraging to take an interest in crafting song lyrics.

Limitless

This is one of my favorite fashion eras, mostly because of Taeil’s shark jacket there on the far right.

To me, “Limitless” is the type of song that you would repeat to yourself like a mantra. It is the perfect type of song for a group that is just debuting, hungry (excuse me, thirsty) for acceptance, love, and fame. It’s disguised as a love song (“oh baby it’s you”), but the main theme is about working hard for your dreams and the limitless potential spread out in front of you.

They were all chasing dreams while being deceived
Most of them only consider themselves as the real deal
Or else they hide with their backs turned
The repeating days are so cruel

Lies stick, they are sticky
In this gray city, it ain’t got a chance
I wondered when the future was gonna come
But it’s in front of my eyes now

Cherry Bomb

“I’m the biggest hit / I’m the biggest hit on the stage.” This is another song that gathers momentum, that speaks into existence what NCT 127 wants to be. It carries multiple messages—that the boys are ready for their songs to hit the world like an explosion, that the haters can come at them and they’re ready. “Cherry Bomb” is intense and explosive, with words, music, and choreo all reflecting one central theme.

Touch

Touch doesn’t exist in my world. It’s a typical “imagine me as your boyfriend”song. More importantly, it was the overt signal that proved that SM decided to crash the NCT concept (although arguably it happened first with the Japanese version of “Limitless”), giving the soft theme to 127 instead of the group’s usual urban-inspired vibe. The song sounds really corporate to me, very much like the Coke ad they did predebut. I dislike it on multiple levels.

Moving on.

Chain

With their Japanese release, however, NCT 127 was back to their normal tricks.

A factor that’s yet to be born (it’s a factor)
The hearts resonating in symphony are a medium (by the medium)
Make a wish, change the reality (we want to)
Get me started, the chain begins now

Chain! Reaction
The chain spreads
Chain! Reaction
From here on, the world is connecting

World domination, creating a great future for themselves, growing as artists…this is the NCT I like. One of the things that I like most about following NCT as a fledgling group of k-pop acts is that their ambition mirrors mine. I find a lot of what I want to do reflected in their songs, in their chord progressions and intensity and even in the wtf-ery of their Limitless-era styling (like clickbait but for clothes).

Most of their songs seemed really authentic to me, coming from a place of wanting to grow as entertainers, to win over fans and haters alike. Even though 90% of k-pop songs are created through the Pop Machine—very few of them are “heartfelt” in the singer/songwriter use of the word—the songs resonated with the group and their goals.

It probably helps that Mark and Taeyong write most of their own rap lyrics.

On my part, perhaps it is too much to expect a young group to sing about their bright and glorious future for too much longer. Clearly at some point the lyrics would have to evolve, and to change.

What I was not expecting was “Regular.”

Disclaimer: this emotional whiplash (heh) is probably fueled by NCT Dream’s latest mini-album, which featured the track “Dear Dream.” This song is almost 100% written by the members, is super heartfelt, and legit makes me cry. It is genuine, real feelings.

“Regular” is not genuine, real feelings. “Regular” is a song that flexes just for the sake of it. Somehow I’m supposed to believe that NCT 127 has gone from “make a wish, we want to change reality” to “I just made a million and I’m still not satisfied”?

These are not the boys that I know. Even if NCT 127 is super-successful now and they’re rolling in money, this doesn’t feel genuine to them. It feels like they’re playing parts. Even the bits that I want to like, such as Mark walking his pet tiger in the MV, make me cringe instead.

These are boys I want to root for, and the fake swag makes it really hard to do that.

I’m still holding out hope. “Regular” is the English-language version of the title track for their upcoming full album, and there will also be a Korean-language version. Apparently the Korean version is on the “regular” section of the album, and the English version is on the “irregular” section of the album—the dreamlike part.

Because all the teasers have been wrapped around a dualistic office drone/after hours type of theme, perhaps this is just in keeping with the extravagant dreams of an office worker.

Maybe the concept will make it work. Until the full album comes out, I cringe.

Update: After a few more listens and watching some reaction videos—specifically this one from PD at Form of Therapy—I’m becoming more comfortable with “Regular” as a concept for NCT 127. There are some execution-related points that I didn’t take into account that change the context of all this:

The English-language version isn’t cringey at allll. The boy’s pronunciation is pretty spot-on. The lyrics are mostly good, and bits that are a little rougher aren’t any worse than comparable American lyrics. (Which is not great—this is why I listen to k-pop, people.)
The concept is the dream of success, from a group that is starting to get some. I really can’t hate that.
The video makes the boys look really, really good.

Overall, it’s a decent American debut.

Personally, though, I can’t get into it. Back when “Boss” came out, I didn’t love it at first either, but it grew on me—the sound engineering is so interesting to listen to. With “Regular,” something about the engineering sounds compressed to me, like their normal range of dynamics is limited (much like circa 2012 pop music) and I’m listening in a fishbowl. It also feels to me like the musical arrangement is monotonous, even though there are different sections that switch up the rhythms and orchestration. I don’t know enough about music theory to tell you why exactly, but that’s how I feel right now.

Also, the instrumentation sounds like Latin-inspired elevator music. I expect so much more from SM Entertainment, honestly. SMH.

Carnivore Meal Ideas

2018-10-08 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

This is not going to be a fancy post. This is going to be a post of some of the things that I eat for dinner.

Most of which is not fancy.

Chicken cooked in duck fat with a side of scrambled eggs

NOT FANCY, I tell you. Duck fat is actually pretty easy to get these days if you go to Whole Foods or a co-op or other specialty store. I just bought a jar of Epic brand duck fat in my attempt to replace butter, and I’m liking it so far.

Buy a package of stir-fry cut chicken breast at the grocery store, and then fry it in duck fat. Leave the fond in the pan. Then, make slow-style scrambled eggs on top of it, incorporating the fond into the eggs. Delicious.

Lamburgers

Ground lamb + Hawaiian red sea salt + Foreman grill. Delicious.

Egg in a hole, carnivore-style

I’m lucky in that one of the grocery stores near me smokes their own pork and sells it shredded. Scatter a handful of that on the Foreman grill, hit it with some Hawaiian red sea salt, and heat until it’s crispy. Meanwhile, whip out that non-stick pan of yours and fry yourself a couple eggs—try to hit the over-medium stage where the yolks are really velvety. When the meat is done, pile it on a plate and lay the eggs over. To eat, break the yolks and enjoy the beautiful sauce that has just enveloped your crispy pork. Delicious.

Instant pot chicken soup

Buy a bunch of chicken drumsticks and throw them into the Instant Pot along with a carton of no-weird-stuff-added chicken bone broth. Punch a bunch of buttons until the Instant Pot starts doing things, and hope it’s doing something that will eventually cook the chicken. After a few rounds of this, let your chicken cool and then pull off the rubbery skin and remove the bones.

I’m still getting the hang of the Instant Pot.

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Batfort

Style reveals substance

Author: childlike empress (page 16 of 67)

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