paralogue.org

i've been thinking about this lately…
but you know what i'm getting at, right? those shows or games or whatnot that you return to when your mind's not in a good place and you just want to feel ok again? something you can put on and it feels like home?

though i can't say i have many things like that… usually when i find something i like i end up burning through it pretty quickly, or sometimes i worry that putting the thing i like on when i'm unwell will somehow taint my feelings about it. but maybe i can still rustle up a few things to talk about anyway. still, i wanna hear about yours!

music

Osamuraisan – Osamuraisan Collection Vol. 3 ~Utaite Hikite~ (2012)



this utaite album with acoustic guitar backing might be a strange choice of album for me to have latched onto, but the album's choice of songs is quite good! and both the playing and the singing make for a comforting environment to fall into and cry it out to.

i especially adore the cover of hello how are you with its gentle, compassionate vocals and its lyrics that make me break down because… that's me, right?

Guided by Voices – Bee Thousand (1994)

bouncing now from a comiket album to gbv's most popular album (and the point where many tap out from exploring the rest of their discography), but i've realized that it's become a friend to me over all these years. maybe it's because it doesn't really put on pretensions to be more than a collection of songs made by some dudes in ohio who mostly just got high and played in local bars together and made albums for their friends.
except the songs are really good.
and eventually you start screaming along to hot freaks and realize that "kicker of elves" is a euphonically pleasing phrase to say all on its own.

anime

Haganai: Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai


maybe this shouldn't count since i first watched it last year, but since i finished it i've had this constant urge to rewatch it, and i finally gave into the urge recently.

for some reason its portrayal of a dysfunctional found-family sticks with me, and i find the show's non-judgmental commitment to letting these characters express their strange desires to be reassuring. and i love them. i love all these freaks. i want to be friends with them and pursue some of them romantically. i too want a place where i feel okay to be myself – messiness and all – so maybe this show is a vicarious outlet for that desire.

Moomin

this one is actually one of my wife's comfort shows, and since we moved in together we've been slowly working our way through it. it's a very cozy, slow-paced, dare i say cottagecore show, and i love getting to watch it with her and ruin it for her little by little. such as by:

• singing along to the opening song, every single time
• pointing out the various times that the moomin family engages in colonialism
• making her think through which characters would cooperate and which would defect in a prisoner's dilemma situation (most would defect)
• looking up the characters on e621 and noticing that sniff, the endlessly whiny clinger-on rodent of the group, is portrayed as being in a diaper in most of his fanart. and while diapers aren't really my thing, those drawings make so much sense to his character that i've headcanoned him as a shitty diaper baby, and now whenever we watch the show and he shows up i can't help but imagine a diaper being on him, slowly filling up over the course of the show.

Ah, watermoon's a GBV fan, huh? I feel like I know so many -- sinku has made me several GBV mixtapes at this point.

Man, okay ... it's hard to distinguish the "5 star" tendency from the "comfort media" tendency when it comes to my engagement. If something feels that close to me, it usually made contact, can manipulate some emotional substrate, the maruness itself ... the patterns feel in some way a reminder of my own pattern, like an incantation that re-establishes myself.

In that regard I think there's a few for music that easily come to mind as things I return to:

• If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian is an album I've played for about twenty years. I remember people would look at my last.fm and say "how can anyone play this much Belle and Sebastian" ... I sing the album front to back in the shower, I put it on every autumn, it's just ... integral. I know it almost too well. I don't know if I own it anymore. Definitely not on vinyl.
• Alaska by Northern Picture Library is a more recent addition, sometime in 2018?, but it made contact quickly. It's a very weird mix of experimental noise stuff and then melancholic pop songs. But it reminds me of the late autumn, rainy Novembers and into the snowy Decembers... If I'm in a key, then it seems to be in that same key. If you know what I mean.
• Then there's strays from my childhood. Specifically Dark at the End of the Tunnel by Oingo Boingo and Adore by the Smashing Pumpkins (man, especially side B), were finds from normally high-tempo acts that just got more introspective and atmospheric.
• But it's not always morose stuff; I think the first two They Might Be Giants records, Hip to the Javabean by Lemon Demon, etc. also fit. They feel key to me.

When it comes to video games, it's Guild Wars, just Guild Wars, only Guild Wars. Nothing else feels like home. I played a lot of video games as a kid. None of them feel in tune with me; they were just places. Guild Wars did not fade. Guild Wars walked with me every phase of my life. Guild Wars is what I go back to.

It makes no sense. It's a combination of aesthetic, gameplay loop, the gentle ask it has in constructing teams, the slow perfection from completing quests and goals you set up for yourself ... I just do it over and over. It must be what Diablo II felt like. Put on a book or an album and just do this for an hour.

Anime? Shows? I don't know. Maybe Star Trek? But it's become connoted with elements of American empire that feel distasteful at the moment. Like I end up feeling just a touch sour about it. I have been bad about rewatching shows, honestly. I don't reread books besides Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy now and then.

Comfort is a bit paired with depression for me; when I'm depressed, I tend to want to engage with it as it is. I want to meet the part of me looking for something. So these all tend to skew more sad. I think it's a form of positive disintegration; I come apart because something new is being born. I have to recede into earlier versions of myself to reconstitute as the next iteration.

maru wrote:

Man, okay ... it's hard to distinguish the "5 star" tendency from the "comfort media" tendency when it comes to my engagement. If something feels that close to me, it usually made contact, can manipulate some emotional substrate, the maruness itself ... the patterns feel in some way a reminder of my own pattern, like an incantation that re-establishes myself.

[snip]

Comfort is a bit paired with depression for me; when I'm depressed, I tend to want to engage with it as it is. I want to meet the part of me looking for something. So these all tend to skew more sad. I think it's a form of positive disintegration; I come apart because something new is being born. I have to recede into earlier versions of myself to reconstitute as the next iteration.

For me I think the distinction is quite clear. When I'm depressed I reach for things that are sort of rote, like Tetris, or like the game OpenFront, or beta Minecraft (in my case, BTA and NFC, these beta-fork mods that rethink aspects of the game). I am drawn to grindy and simplistic games like this because I think they offer a kind of surrogate task that is better than no other. They are entirely pointless, partially random, and hard to fuck up. You can lose but they aren't demanding mentally. Helps me to get away from myself. And the lack of a clear goal or one so nebulous that it barely matters leaves me to self direct. Though, OpenFront and Tetris are sorta outliers in that lens. They are goal-oriented but you can still shut down your personality and look at them in a sort of robotic optimizing way. Whereas Minecraft lets me turn off my personality and pursue pure expression or pure acquisition, almost like automatic writing.