lily_lxndr
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February production diary: the fascist creep, and some absolute bangers
🕑 Added 2024-02-14 05:39:12 +0000 UTCOver the past few months, "the gender identity debate" has broken into the Canadian mainstream for the first time. Canada's nascent gender-critical movement is not purely a pseudo-feminist one or a Christian one – instead, it's a bewildering coalition of feminists, edgy populists, the Christian right, Muslim organizations, and honest-to-god neo-Nazis. People who seem like they should have little in common are suddenly finding a lot of common ground in opposing us.
Though trans-exclusionary radical feminists started the gender-critical wave, they're still the faction that leaves me most confused. The (garbage, misguided) ideology has roots in legitimate feminism – how was it possible for the right-wing capture them so completely that the Conservative Party of Canada is banking on it winning them an election?
My next video, The Feminist to Far-Right Pipeline, is about how the right hijacked radical feminism and fashioned the gender-critical movement into a funnel into austerity economics, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white supremacist conspiracy theory.
It'll be out sometime next month - been held up due to another project in the works + health issues but we're back, baby, and better than ever!
"Lily Recommends Some Stuff" (please suggest a better name for this segment):
I have two BANGERS for you this month.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
A couple years ago, I designated myself the Personal Champion of an indie game called Perfect Tides. I really liked it and wanted others to give it a chance! Now, a sequel is in the works, and the demo came out today, and it blows the first game out of the water.
This is what many of you look like this very second... coincidence?!
Perfect Tides was a classic point-and-click adventure game set in the early 2000s. You follow teenager Mara over one school year as she tries to get her anger under control, develop her craft as a writer, and build (tenuous, but) deep bonds with the people around her. It was as clunky you'd expect from a classic point-and-click, but nonetheless something special by way of its masterful prose and character-building. I cried a lot!
Station to Station finds Mara a few years later, as a college student studying writing in Da Big Apple, Baby. It’s a full-on “writing undergrad” social sim: you catalog ideas in your flip phone, then mash them together to like, write papers, or bullshit your boss. You experiment with being a grown-up, and success and failure both feel deeply cathartic. The looks and sounds lovely, the world is overflowing with possibility, and even from the demo, I can tell it’s leading me some emotionally devastating places.
I assume this is a 1:1 recreation of getting a bachelor’s degree. Guess I didn’t need real university after all, huh, mom?! (Kidding, my mom is very supportive of my choices, and also she’s reading this right now 👋)
The demo’s free and 1 hour long. You should play it! (Note: Steam says it can’t run on newer MacOS, but it totally does.)
The Red Shoes
Ballet has always been something I've admired, but I've never really "gotten it" in the way I figure real aficionados do. As with other "high art", like classical music or opera, when people discuss the plot or themes present in a piece, I struggle to understand where they're getting it from.
Not so for The Red Shoes – a proper fucking movie – one of the best I've ever seen.
This movie's climactic dance sequence had me crying tears of astonishment, repeatedly saying "oh my god, oh my god" to nobody in particular. The Red Shoes makes a case for dance as a universal language, not some stuffy art form shielded from daily life, but an extension of life itself, an examination of what it means to live in a body.
The whole back half had me feeling like Danny Devito in – whoops, back to low art with this reference – that one episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
As a high-school-educated person with no classical background, I never felt anything but deserving of this experience. The movie communicates so clearly that my cluelessness re: dance doesn't matter: I move around every day, it's all the same.
Vouch!!
Alright, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading, and for being here. Take care, folks. ❤️
Comments
Lily Alexandre
isn’t it UNREAL!
Celia
I watched 'The Red Shoes' a few days ago because of your rec and that dance sequence had me sitting mouth open, totally incredible!
Lily Alexandre
okay, think it's fixed now!! phew
Fox Auslander
YES! i read the post in full via the email patreon sent over last night, but the post on the site itself is bonked.
Lily Alexandre
Hey folks, is anyone seeing a sentence cut off at "Station to Station is"? I wrote lots of stuff there, and in a couple other places that are missing now. I swear it looked fine when I went to bed last night, but I think Patreon might've AGAIN deleted a couple big chunks of a post? 😡
Anna Nicholson
Scary to see how things are going in Canada, which seems to be pretty much how they’re going here in the UK. Look forward to watching your video. ☺️
RoomRar
Looking forward to the new vid. Arrived in Vancouver in January and will the staying in the country of Canada for half a year-ish and been hearing about the news, whats going on in Alberta, and have been figuring the healthcare here for myself. Mainly figuring out how to continue my hrt stuff from the Netherlands as smoothly as possible. It's interesting seeing how incredibly differently queer safe-spaces are signified here. You wont find as many pride flags in stores, coffee-shops and cafes in the Netherlands.
Charlotte Indigo
The Time Lily Does Reviews or TLDR for short. Sorry if that is too nerdy.
frogsmore
Totally agree; The Red Shoes is a masterpiece, but your description and interpretation, Lily, brought tears to my eyes, because that's exactly what dance means to me. Thank you yet again beautiful you
