Gawr Gura memorial song: "In the Real World" by the Little Vir-maid

The virtual shark-girl streamer who took the world by storm officially graduates today. I have a whole backlog of tribute songs I'll be posting here. This "in memoriam" song is set to the tune of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid (lyrics, music).

As I said with Mumei's memorial song, Millennials and especially Zoomers' native habitat is online, so IRL is this strange exotic territory that they're alternately fascinated and frightened by. Growing up, maturing, leaving the nest -- these all have to do with finding their place in meatspace, and navigating relations with the perplexing creatures called "other people" (as opposed to, "other accounts").

In Goob's case, she got pulled out into IRL without intending to. Fandom taboos aside, it's pretty clear that she became a mommy -- like the time she came back and while casually chatting with Ame, asked out of nowhere if she had ever lactated, totally matter of factly, as if to compare notes with her own experience.

Details like that are important, not as gossip about e-celebs, but to make it clear that she has a perfectly respectable and noble reason for having largely left behind her turboposting memelord career for the past couple years. And to emphasize that IRL still has a powerful attractive pull, yes even on terminally online, algo-poisoned Zoomer brains.

And that's what this memorial song is about -- her feeling restless after living and doing so much online, and wanting to escape out into a normie IRL existence (notwithstanding the occasional visit / reunion). For the veterans of irony-poisoned toxic content wars, IRL normie life is not "settling" or "retiring" -- it's liberating and rejuvenating! ^_^

(Atypical stress patterns: CARE-ee-oh-KEY, ee-MOTES, meat-STAN, tar-ZAN. And "nendie" is short for Nendoroid. Also, do Millennials and Zoomers realize that "cut the cord" is an allusion to cutting the umbilical cord? That's where the phrase came from relating to devices that we have become dependent on -- if it were literal, you wouldn't cut that kind of cord, but simply unplug it.)

* * *

Look at these subs, all at tier 3
Breaking the 'net during karaoke
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who sets trendy things?

Custom emotes, membership gold
How many fan-arts can one hard drive hold?
Lurking around /here/ you'd think
"She's the trending thing"

I've got ad rev and anime nendies
Several spots 'top the meme leaderboard
A million followers? I've got twenty
But fresh air, can't be streamed -- cut the cord

I wanna be, in the greenest yard
I wanna breathe, all the flowers they're planting
Grilling their ribs with that -- what do ya call it?
Oh, mesquite

Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard
Hands are required for shaking, planting
Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?
Tree

Out where they talk
And call you by "hon"
Out where they're face to face, one on one
Shooting the breeze
Wish I could be
In the real world

Trade all my clips, to trade some quips
Not just spam "poggers"
Pay 'em top rate, to elongate
My attention span
Bet in Meatstan, Jane finds Tarzan
Bet they don't shadowban mom bloggers
Online women, sick of simpin'
Won't trust the plan

I'm ready to grow where the green grass grows
Ask 'em my questions and get some answers
What are tires and why do they -- what's the word?
Turn
New routes to learn
It'd be such a buff
Forevermore live outdoors, off the cuff

Off the PC
Climb out the screen
To the real world

Memorial song, "IRL-mei" by Moomlan

Now that Hololive's owl-girl Mumei has left the nest, here's one last tribute song to memorialize her, in case she's still lurking (she does like to watch, y'know...).

Set to the tune of "Reflection" from Mulan (lyrics, music). Her fandom uses "-mei" to refer to various personas of hers, like "lolimei" for when she talks about her school days. So IRL-mei is who she is in real life.

I really had a think about this, which way should it be framed? -- her online persona is the real, primary one, and her IRL persona is a disguise? Or the other way around?

For Gen X-ers and earlier, our IRL selves are the real thing, and we adopt masks or disguises online.

For Millennials and Zoomers, though, they live and grew up so online, that's their primary unmediated self -- strange as it may seem, given that it is technologically mediated. But in the sense of not disguised -- not very much anyway. And their IRL persona is the more heavily guarded, disguised, not so recognizable version of their true online self.

Moom, in her role as a paranoid schizo conspiracy theory Disney princess, always kept her online persona heavily guarded from her family and friends. And although she shared lots of personal details with her audience, she still kept her IRL life at some distance. Leading two lives, or trying to live in two worlds at the same time.

But I think her online persona was/is the real one -- whether as Nanashi Mumei from Hololive-English Council, or in her earlier online existence(s), she used her cyber-persona to confide in people, vent, open up, express herself, and in general be her true self. Her IRL persona, as she shared many times with us, was mostly a blurry cloud to those around her, a ghost in a black hoodie (or something like that), as one of her schoolmates described it to her.

So I wrote this from the perspective of her online persona being the deep-down true one, and her IRL persona being a secondary, shadowy projection of it.

Recently she mentioned that she's going to open up to her family about what her vtuber persona and experience were, to some degree anyway. That's the story of character growth and maturity for raised-online Millennials and Zoomers -- being able to discuss your username, avatar, posting history, content archive, and so on. That's the *real* you, and you don't just share it with any ol' group of people from IRL!

It took getting such a fascinated welcoming reception from online audiences, to convince Moom that she really is talented, lovable, and... interesting! She would never want us to call her "cool". ^_^

We're glad we could play a role in giving you the confidence necessary to Just Be Yourself (TM) with those close to you IRL, you sweet schizo songbird, you. ^_^

* * *

Look at me
I could never last out in normie life
Or sail normie waters
Can it be
I was meant to spark fan-art?
Now I see
If I talked to them through my live2D
Their view of me would press restart

Who is that owl on screen
Singing proud in worldwide streams?

Why is IRL-mei someone I won't post?

Somehow I cannot priv
The girl who lives in my archive

When will IRL-mei share
Who I am online?

When will IRL-mei share
Who I am online?

Programming note: series on coziness in architecture, from the room scale to the city plan scale, with cross-cultural and cross-temporal studies

It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.

We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.

Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.

And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.

Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.

We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.

But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.

And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.

It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.

If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...

If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...

If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...

We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.

Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.

I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^