It’s the last QRIMOLE for 2020!  Let’s take a look at more questions for Kpopalypse!

Hi kpopalypse.

I have been listening to the new group stayc  and gosh i think it’s amazing, please correct me if i’m wrong but, the melody is better than most of this year realases, isn’t it? Would you say the girls singing at 0:34 and 1:06 have better melody lines than average or “unique” vocal inflections ? I dont know, im genuinely loving those parts.
Also would you mind mentioning a couple songs with your fave melody lines, thanks

Stay-C’s song is great but it’s also up against some stiff competition!  It’s definitely the melody/harmony writing that makes the song work, and that’s been a characteristic of a lot of this year’s best songs.  You won’t have to wait long for more information plus some song recommendations, the end of year lists are only a month away.  

Do you think it’s easy for you to mess up the red commies with the green party?

Not sure what you’re asking so I’ll answer your question two ways.  Just talking about political parties in general, Australia has a green party and a communist party.  The green party has on occasion got up to nearly 10% of the vote and are considered semi-relevant because while they’ll never be in power they do sometimes get senate seats that can tip the balance of legislation getting passed, whereas the communist party, literally nobody gives a fuck about those guys and most Australians don’t even know about them at all.  Talking more broadly, environmentalism is inherently a capitalist concern – green technology is catering to market demand, because most people want to live in a clean environment, and most businesses require a stable environment in which to continue to operate, and a bad environment means instability.  The green revolution won’t come from progressive politics, it’ll come from the market: startup companies with new tech that gets popular and Elon Musk types with the capital to push tech through to the mainstream.  So in other words if you want to save the environment stan Loona.   

Hello Kpopalypse,
You’ve mentioned how you were bullied as a kid and ended up more resilient to people’s shit. I was bullied too but unfortunately the opposite happened and I became a people-pleaser who can’t handle others not liking me and cries over everything. Normally it ends up with people either chastising, mocking or pitying me, all of which suck. I want to be able to not give a fuck about what others say about me or cry whenever someone slightly raises their voice.
I know you’ve given advice before about focusing on self-improvement but it feels like I can’t change no matter what I do. Any advice on pushing forward?
Thanks in advance.

Well, look at where your people-pleasing has gotten you so far – nowhere, right?  if you want different results you’re going to have to think differently and act differently.  Sure, there’s a time and a place, and sometimes people should be pleased if they’re being nice or whatever, but if you bow your head to bullies you will reinforce the pattern.  Depression is internalised anger so I would suggest that instead of internalising, push some of that energy outward.  It doesn’t have to be much – just enough to break the pattern.  When breaking a bad behavioural pattern, you don’t change overnight, instead you start small and build healthy new habits to replace the old.

what do you think of filipino pop (p pop)

Before I even opened the link I knew it was going to be that boring “Coconut Nut” song, which I’ve been asked about over two dozen times since it came out for no clear reason.  Other countries do their own versions of k-pop all the time and you can find hundreds of videos like this from nearly every country in Asia.  I don’t see what the big fucking deal is and why everyone is losing their shit over this particular song.  There’s literally nothing to see here, also, this isn’t Ppopalypse.

Dear Unrest Uncle,
I’m in my second year of premed, soon I’ll write the exams and if all goes well I’ll be a full nedical student. It’s just that at this point I really don’t know whether I still want to go through with it. Unfortunately changing course is not really an option at this point, since my parents are the ones funding my university education. It’s not like they’re making me do it by force; I was the one who chose my course. I’ve always been interested in writing, coding and graphic design, and I’ve had time this year to explore them (because COVID19).

Basically, I’m asking for advice. Sometimes I don’t mind the thought of being a doctor, and no it’s not for the money, only in private hospitals do doctors get well paid over here (at the cost of being overworked). But other times I wonder if I’d be happier doing something else. Learning about the human body is pretty interesting, but it’s the exams and tests that make things horrible (stuff like having to memorize and be able to draw chemical structures for biochemistry, even though I don’t think any of them actually can draw those. Or having to write not less than five pages for an essay even though you can say everything on the topic with less). Also add to that the fact that for our first year we only refresh what we’ve already been taught in secondary school, and in our second year they dump all this knowledge on us that we should know before entering medical school proper. I’m just tired, and life as something other than what I am presently seems pretty easy. I just wonder that if I stick with medicine but don’t eventually practice, will it all have been a waste of my time? Will I regret it? I don’t want to.
Thanks for providing quality content. I always look forward to Mondays because of the roundup. Your reviews are always funny, even when you’re shitting on my faves.

“Writing, coding and graphic design” sounds pretty broad.  Since I don’t know exactly what you want to get into, it’s hard to say whether you just have rose-coloured glasses or not.  However what I will say is that your job doesn’t define who you are, and you’re allowed to do all sorts of things with your time!  Right now I’ve had to dump nearly all of my music industry work due to COVID vanishing large chunks of my industry literally overnight, and pick up other work elsewhere, but it doesn’t change the things I enjoy doing.  I have no idea what medical study is like so it’s really hard for me to advise you further than this.  Perhaps chat to your parents about your feelings and see what happens there – they might baulk and get shitty, but they also might surprise you with some really good advice, if you approach them in an “I just would like some advice” kind of way.

Hi Kpopalypse! Hope you’re doing well. So, the big news right now is BTS Grammy nomination. I don’t think Grammys are as amazing as kpop fans think, but oh well, the boys really wanted that nomination, so congratulations to them! However, it’s a disappointment the were nominated for… that. It’s not like they’ve released masterpieces lately, but Dynamite feels like the lowest effort possible. I’m picturing the meeting at the company, discussing how all they needed for a Grammy nomination was a song fully in English, so they went for the first thing they got. They know fans will buy any attempt at putting 2 notes together as the best song of the year, but apparently so do now critics and whoever decides Grammy nominations. Sorry, this was more a rant than anything else. My questions are the following: how do you feel about having boring, low effort and uninspired songs getting such big recognition and reward? Do you think this will lead to more bored, low effort and uninspired songs, as fans will accept and buy whatever they’re given just to prove their favs are superior?

The Grammys have been a shit-show since the 1960s, they have never been about music quality and nothing has changed on that front, ever.  I’m constantly surprised that people consistently expect the Grammys to be relevant for some weird reason and then are always shocked each and every year when crappy decisions are made.  Further reading here about the joke that is music awards in general and here about the joke that is the Grammys specifically.

Not kpop related, but lately I’ve seen quite a bunch of people hyping and glorifying The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I think it’s a great album with many amazing songs, but do you think it really deserves all the praise it gets?

I was never a huge fan of this group even back when they were at their “Mellon Collie” peak, and I never even listened to that album in full.  I mean it was two CDs, fuck that, who has the time for double-albums, not me by the time in my life that came out, a double-album is usually an indication of a lack of editing and someone’s ego going wild.  So anyway since I never heard it I can’t really say with any authority whether it’s a good album or not.  D’arcy did mrs back in the day though, reminds me of an ex gf.

Here’s a fun food for thought: what do you think? I know you’ve mentioned in the past that idols date all the time and just don’t say it on camera (and I believe it for the most part) but his point of view brings a different approach that I’ve heard certain people say, which is that it’s just not really worth the risk to date (or, in his case, it’d be a waste of time)

Do you find it sad that he basically lives for work or is it realistic to think that dating is kind of a waste of time for a k-pop idol if you ever want to make it? In his case he does get royalties so I guess he can think about getting more royalties over time, whereas other idols only get that sum (if they ever get any) every comeback and then it falls off into nothing.

I think that all idols probably understand that dating is a risk in the fucked up Korean industry where they have to maintain the dumb fantasy of virginity to please fuckheaded fans who think idols owe them their personal lives or whatever.  I guess the question idols have to ask themselves is – can they manage the risk easily or is it something that could get out of control, and how likely is their entire bubble to burst if that happens.  Given the sheer amount of dating that does go on (I’m told by various sources that it’s “a lot” and that “most” idols date) versus the amount of idols actually getting caught (a small trickle) it seems pretty manageable for most of them. 

The way Jae is answering the question I think it’s quite clear his real message isn’t “I don’t date and never will because gosh I’m an idol and we don’t do the thing”, it’s more like “don’t put me on the spot and ask me this fucking question, what’s the point, I’m an idol so you already know what I have to say to you in reply”.

Hello Mr Kpopalypse Oppar Sir, my friends are giving me a lot of shit for saying this song and this song sound the same and are basically the same song just the txt one is pitched up, so can you give me your opinion? plz n thx

Ask your friends how long have they been tone deaf for.

Hi oppar, what are your favorite Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath albums? My boyfriend is a metal head and I want to learn metal better because he supports me in K-pop (going to concerts, attending events, buying albums, etc) unconditionally and I kinda wanna return the favor. I’m asking for the two bands above because I remember him saying it’s a good idea to start out with the two because they’re the biggest metal acts ever and they have melodic singing, so it will be easier to get into as opposed to screaming stuff. When I asked him which album to start with (this was like a year ago), I remember him saying they just sound the same so pick anything that has a cool album cover but that didn’t really help haha

Also, his favorite metal subgenres are doom metal, black metal, and thrash metal. Would you care to give me a few bands where I can start with?

Also one last question, any source material I can read/listen to for metal subgenres? Like I’ve read material on it but I still can’t differentiate it very well. Like he doesn’t like nu-metal, glam metal, and few other subgenres, but honestly most metal just sound the same to me…

He’s not much of a metalhead if he doesn’t even have any opinions about this question and you have to ask a k-pop blogger instead!  He loses serious metalhead points for this, most metalheads I know can talk for hours about this shit.  Make sure that you mock him about this mercilessly.

Black Sabbath – any of the Ozzy 1970s albums.  Dio was okay I guess but the sound changed and I’m not really a fan of his style.  The 80s and after albums with other singers who are not Ozzy or Dio, best forget that they even exist.

Iron Maiden – the first few albums when Bruce Dickinson joined the group are the best, Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind and Powerslave.  Also Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is quite good.  The very early albums with Paul Di’anno are good too but his rougher vocals give the group more of a punk vibe which while I personally like it, I will admit doesn’t suit the music as well.  Other albums are okay though.  The only bad Iron Maiden albums are the couple they did in the 1990s with Blaze Bailey on vocals, those are a straight nope.

Doom metal – Black Sabbath of course, also Electric Wizard, Ghost (when they’re not being a great pop band instead), a French band called Monarch are great, Blood Ceremony, Candlemass, there’s a fair few others

Black metal – Bathory’s early sound, Celtic Frost’s early sound and anything that sounds like those two groups (i.e Darkthrone)

Thrash metal – Sepultura and Kreator are the best thrash groups that never got the credit they deserved, both were consistently better than “The Big Four”.

Source material – watch the documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” which is an excellent introduction to metal if you know nothing about it.  Their “history of metal” reference chart is a good overview of the various subgenres and covers most of the relevant groups.

kpopalypse oppar i have a question… idk if this has been asked before but i was wondering if there was a difference between handheld mics and headsets, and why would a performer choose to use one or the other? (especially in kpop group stages where some members use one and the rest of them the other)

Answered here.

Recently girl group BerryGood’s music was temporally taken off Spotify, iTunes and so forth due to changing companies or distributors or something. Their music is back up now, but I was kind of surprised when I listened to ‘Love Letter’. It sounds…different, like the vocals are now too loud for the backing track, if that makes sense. It didn’t sound like this back before it was taken down, I’m sure of that. It sounds like this on Spotify and iTunes (I don’t have Apple Music). Other songs like ‘Angel’ sound fine to me. I don’t know if you have any of those music services, but is there any reason you can think of that this might of happened? Or am I just hearing things?

It’s hard for me to say.  I don’t use streaming services at all because I’m completely against streaming as a business model because of the way they shaft artists (the best thing Taylor Swift did for the music industry was not give her songs to streaming services), so I’m not familiar with how the track may have sounded, therefore it’s impossible for me to really say whether you’re just imagining this or whether they really did something to it.  All I can think of was they might have uploaded the wrong mix of the song by mistake when they put it back up.  Companies do release the wrong mix sometimes, this actually happened to a band I personally know who went to great expense to have their album recorded and mastered with pristine quality for the label to accidentally press the CD with an unfinished mix instead.

I previously asked about the demo version and the official version of I Am You for the livestream, but you said to narrow down my question, so here is my second try: I’m wondering if you can comment on the difference between the two versions specifically at 0:40 for the demo  and 0:40 for the official song  where the rap verse ends and the pre-chorus starts, and then at 0:52 for both versions respectively when the pre-chorus ends and the chorus starts. the melodies sound totally different which is what caught my attention and made me want to ask you about this. I understand that you may not have a preference since you can’t pick up much details from the demo due to the environment where it was played, and I may well have fan-goggles on, but I thought the melody in the demo fit the backing track a lot better. I guess it’s possible that they changed the chorus melody to suit another member’s vocal range/colour. Thanks for listening!

Yeah they obviously changed both melodies quite a bit.  Demos do often get changed around quite a bit on their way to being a finished product, demo meaning “demonstration” of course so there’s no expectation that a demo version is going to go through to the final product “untouched” by the creative hand, the entire point of a demo is to get the idea out there so it can then be refined.  Sometimes it might be a member coming or leaving, or it might just be that someone thought a different melody worked better in a certain spot, or decided that different lyrics fit a theme better, or any number of other reasons.  I don’t have a strong preference in this case, I’d argue that they’re more or less interchangeable, but then that might just because because this song doesn’t really do anything much for me.  However I do agree that sometimes demos can sound better than the final product, sometimes a finished k-pop song can feel like a case of “too many cooks” given the amount of creative checks and balances that a k-pop song often goes through.

This is the demo for Weki Meki’s Picky Picky:

1) God my ears. Do you think this a dude singing the demo that pitched his voice up or is it just vocal processing nonsense?

2) How does the process of recording a k-pop/pop demo like this work? Do the producer(s) make the instrumental and/or vocal melody and they just hire a person to sing on it?

Again, the key word is “demo” – demonstration.  Yeah it’s probably a guy singing and the pitch has been heavily Autotuned up, because the guy who wrote it knew that females would be actually singing it so he moved his voice electronically into a more female range so the people he was pitching this demo to could get some ideas of how the melody would actually work when sung by the girls.  Demos are not supposed to sound “good”, they’re supposed to accurately convey the song’s overarching melody, harmony and feel, so those things can then be toyed with and altered to suit, then singers can be brought in, then things might get toyed with again, etc.  If a demo sounds exactly like a finished product, that’s actually bad, it usually means someone didn’t do their job.

check out this anime ending song:

no

hi, hope your doing well. I draw do art as a hobby, but I’m so frustrated with how it looks. I feel like all my art looks like shit. I’ve only been doing it for 2 years, and I know it takes time to get better at art, but it’s soooo frustrating! I just want to be happy with the stuff I draw, but it’s never how I want it in my eyes! I don’t want to quit either, I should just keep toughing it out, huh?

yes

Do you mute all chat while playing LoL? Why or why not?

I always mute my own chat when playing League Of Legends, although I don’t mind if others talk to me.  I really like the ping system in that game and the fact that I don’t really need to talk to people.  I don’t like talking while gaming and LoL is really well designed in ways that allow you to get by without it.

Heya K. Popa Lypse nim I’ve sent in some questions before but I thought I’d share a recent happening. This girl I dated when I was 15 got back together with me a couple months ago (for clarification: i am less bein and 20) and we had a pretty great time dating. Then in October she seemingly randomly broke up with me (claiming her work was taking up too much of her energy, okay whatever fine) over text and blocked me on all social media. I come to find out that she was cheating on me with someone she was supposedly in love with for 6 years and didn’t have the balls to tell me. I vented to one of my best friends about this, and she jokingly made a post on her blog telling people to hex my ex. I don’t know how my ex even saw this since my friend deleted it pretty quickly and the two of them do not know each other, but apparently she did because…now she’s saying that I cursed her and caused not only her new gf to break up with her, but also that this supposed curse made her grandfather sick, etc, etc. I always thought of her as a pretty level-headed person, but this is just fucking nuts to me. She apparently got a coworker to use magic to undo the curse, which. Okay. I know I’m probably way too hung up on this but she’s crafted this narrative she’s telling her fans (she’s a pretty popular fanfiction writer) that poor her did nothing wrong and that I used black magic on her. Have you ever had an ex that was fine while you dated them but really weird afterwards? Also what are your thoughts on this fuckery?

Yeah I’ve had exes go psycho on me, but really they didn’t suddenly become psycho, rather they were nuts all along and I was too stupid to realise.  Oh well, the things you learn – more recent relationships have been better in that regard, the last few exes I’ve had before my current gf were and are actually relatively reasonable people and I’ve remained on generally good terms with them.  As for the hex stuff, I don’t really put much stock in that kind of stuff but I guess the proof is in the pudding so if I were you I would enjoy your newfound powers.

what is qrimole?

It’s a series where people such as yourself can ask me questions and I will publish them along with the answers monthly.  Hopefully next month you think of a better question than this one.

Twice has been getting a lot of criticism for not being able to sing without a backing track during encores at music shows. As a faithful cao ni ma, I don’t care that much about idols’ vocals, but I watched a few videos and felt really embarrassed for the girls–Jihyo and Nayeon are belting out their lyrics with almost no problem and the others are whispering into the mic, singing off-key, or just standing there looking terrified when their parts come up. Most other groups who win #1 at music shows regularly (Gfriend, Mamamoo, Oh My Girl, etc) are capable of decent live singing, so why do you think JYP hasn’t spent more time on vocal coaching for Twice or given them songs that are easier for them to sing–or just told them to stop trying to sing live at all? What’s the point of putting them through this ordeal when most of them just don’t have the skills?

Because it doesn’t matter.  JYP isn’t selling Twice as singers, he’s selling Twice as people, he clearly didn’t really select them with their voices in mind.  Nobody who is in love with [insert your Twice bias here] really loves them because of their voice, instead people fell in love with the projected look and personality, and “oh they have such stability” or whatever bullshit came after.  However there are requirements on these shows that the girls “sing” so that’s what they have to do, regardless of ability.  It doesn’t matter anyway, everybody fakes it to some degree, even the “good singers”.  Mariah Carey has a five-octave vocal range and I can’t tell you how many times she mimed over a backing track but it’s a lot.  If she’s faking it, you can bet the rest are.

Might as well go for this!

So I’m in a fandom that has fights with itself once a month. There’s a lot of claiming to be “peaceful” and “one of the nicest fandoms out there”, but people get shunned and shamed out of there all the time, for reasons as valid as because they were sexualizing minors and as stupid as not wanting a baritone to sing a note that’s way too high for him to “hey, a member of this group dated a high schooler and took her out drinking, should we talk about this or not?” (We shouldn’t, apparently.) When we get along, it’s great, and when we don’t, it sucks.

It’s usually the same people on the same sides of the stupider arguments, which is fine, but it also means cliques form. Being out of the “main” clique means you can’t access as much content for this fandom, because they hide it in a private discord. One wrong move (like referring to it as a discord, or tweeting something the admins don’t like) and boom, here’s a huge chunk of stuff you’ll either have to pay for out of pocket during a pandemic or just be fine with never seeing again. I got banned from said server because a friend of mine said something the admins didn’t like, without any prior warning or an explanation (I only found out that that was why thanks to another friend, who I can’t talk to publicly there because I don’t want them to be on the bad side of these clout chasing assholes), and while I’m fine with paying for some stuff, there’s other stuff I can only see through people vagueposting about it. I’ve tried to start a more centralized blog for this stuff, also as an archive, but I’m one of the only contributors and it’s hard.

But this isn’t about that, actually! It’s about someone I met who’s very much in the main clique. They’re smart, funny, extremely cute, and just a joy to talk to. I developed a crush on them fast, and by some miracle, they like me back… but a particularly bad bout of the monthly drama hit just at the beginning of the month (this time about “forcing” people to stan other groups, aka “just tweeting when they do stuff”) and things have been awkward ever since. I took a hiatus from Twitter because it was genuinely negatively affecting my psyche and started DMing them on another platform, but our conversations are short and I often get left on read. Even accounting for our time zone difference, I’m definitely being ignored, or our conversations go silent for no reason. It feels like I’m the only one making an effort and I like them so, so much, but I’m lonely. I’ve talked to them about it some (we’re well aware that we’re in “opposing camps” and I actually unfollowed someone who’s content I really like because I wanted to keep being with them) but things have stagnated. I have no idea where to move from here.

Fandoms sure do suck, don’t they.  None of this is surprising and it’s a big part of why I never have participated in any fandom in any meaningful way beyond just saying hello occasionally.

Your crush – stand your ground – don’t ever compromise for appeasement’s sake because it’ll reinforce an unhealthy dynamic, and don’t pour your energy into a hole for nothing.  Refollow the person you unfollowed, don’t do things like that to maintain a friendship or relationship.  If someone really likes you for you, they’ll like you regardless of how you feel about fandom drama, who you associate with or any other issues.  I don’t see perfectly eye to eye with my current partner on all issues ever, but we’ve been together over ten years now, we learn to let the little things go.  I suspect you already know this, it’s something that the other person needs to learn to do perhaps.  I would stop giving them so much of yourself – if they leave you on read just stop sending stuff until they respond.  Don’t make a big deal of it either – just continue to put in exactly the same amount of energy that you get back – no more, no less.  They’ll either come around and start communicating more, or they won’t – either is a good outcome.

Hi Kpopalypse, how are you? I was wondering if I could ask for your advice? There’s this person I met online and for some reason, I have a weird feeling about them. They haven’t done anything or said anything to cause it, but I am reluctant to build a friendship with them? When I first messaged them on anon, they said I should dm them. I honestly didn’t feel comfortable (as far as I know, the platform we’re using doesn’t use the dm function often. public asks and anon asks are pretty common). So I used my own account to message them again and this time it was shown publicly. They responded to my question enthusiastically and asked me to dm them again. It makes sense so a lot of the people who follow them won’t see our convo on their page (unless they private it). So I dmed them and I don’t know, I don’t have any reason to not talk to them. They’re satisfied with dming and I did reach out to them first, but it just feels bad. I’m a bit afraid of them since this was the first time I revealed myself so soon in one of my online friendships, so it’s probably my own problem, right? There’s no reason to feel this way, so: what does this look like from a third person perspective? If the answer I don’t fucking know that’s understandable. Thank you for letting me send this anyway.

It’s hard to say without seeing any of the actual content or the context of the conversations.  Some people just like being private, I guess?  Mind you if he’s insisting on privacy for things that are really super-benign it could be an indication that he wants to try to take the conversation into more “private” areas.  It’s impossible to really answer this definitively.  Just be cautious I guess and don’t agree to anything crazy, the fact that your gut tells you things might be a bit strange is probably something you should listen to.

Hi, hope you’re doing well. I have a quick question. I’m doing a fun little music production project with a group of five other friends for a club. Obviously, we want it to sound good, but it’s not going to be anything of tip top quality or musically advanced, so that’s not really what I’m asking advice for. My question is: What are some strategies that help increase effective team work and help everyone’s voices be heard? We’ll have different people working on different things, but I want to make sure everyone gets to have their creative input, rather than just shoving people off into the corner to do documentation or any of the other mind-numbingly boring stuff that the club requires. As I assume you’ve done a lot of musical collaboration, what’s a good way to ensure that the best product gets produced while still hearing everyone’s ideas? Thanks!

There’s a big difference between “effective team work” and “everyone’s voices are heard”, believe it or not.  One of the great things about being in bands is that everyone often has different strengths.  In my band I do a lot of the creative stuff and musical troubleshooting because I’m really good at it and if there’s a problem I can fix it very quickly.  There’s another guy who takes on the “band leader” role because he’s really very good at that, and another guy who tends to get us the gigs because once again that’s something he’s better at than the rest of us, and another who tends to take most of the lead during press interviews because being a spokesperson is his comfort zone, etc.  If there’s a horrible task that literally nobody wants to do then yes people should share, but if some people are super passionate about doing X and there are other people in the band who don’t give a shit about X and are happy for others to handle it, then just let it be that way – it’s far better to let people exist in their comfort zones than to try and force inclusivity like those horrid butchers-paper brainstorming exercises that work training groups do.  The main thing is just to make sure that there’s nobody with a huge grievance, who wants to do something and is being cut out, that’s what to watch for – if you can eliminate that aspect, then letting people fill whatever roles they want to designate for themselves works fine and is in fact how most professional bands operate.

Hi hyung, thanks for your answer! I wanted to post the message below as a reply but failed. Facebook seems to regard my old inactive account as fake. This long message is not exactly a question, so I don’t mind whether you post it or not in the next QRIMOLE. As long as it reached you, I’d be just happy. See you around!

I won’t repost your very long reply here as it will make no sense in this context, but I found your original reply on the article you left it on which got caught in my spam filter, and I’ve now okay’ed it so it should be in the article comments now.  My spam filter is quite strict and sometimes has a mind of its own, as a general rule the longer your comment is, the more chance something in there will trigger the filter.

How come we have attitude controvercies such as Irene’s?
From what I understand about kpop, idols come in large quantites and are easily replacable, which puts them in a weak position. If 1000 girls all want a job, you can just select the most desperate one who will sacrifice the most. I’d think if one idol is a pain to work with, another 50 idols are eagerly waiting to take their spot with a big smile. It’s one thing to be a snake to groupmates, but a whole other thing to be unprofessional towards people who hold power over you and can end your career. Also just consider the financial losses if partnerships get cancelled because your idols can’t help but act like angry monkeys on set.

Idk rude idols make no sense to me as I thought kpop idols aren’t in that position of power where they can afford to be rude. So how to make sense of that?

The way to make sense of it is to realise that what’s hyped as a one-sided situation is often far more nuanced.  The media rarely tells the whole truth about anything at all, even when that truth is readily available, you’ll find out this for yourself first hand if you or somebody that you know closely ever gets in the media.  When I was young a friend of mine was killed in a shooting incident that made the front page of the papers in my city.  They only published the things about him that made him look as much like an “innocent victim” as possible (he liked classical music, and feeding the ducks by the pond where he lived), they left out anything that could possible be perceived as negative (he was in a thrash metal band (very taboo back then), he was also pretty racist which is how he ended up getting shot in the first place).  This is the main reason why I don’t go for this fascination about “mess” that so many people seem to have.  I only use it as an opportunity to poke holes in people’s and the industry’s fucking hypocrisy, I have no interest in the gossip itself.  People asked me when I interviewed Cheska why I didn’t ask her more stuff about who did plastic surgery or whatever other stuff, it’s because I don’t give a fuck.  I care more about the things that happened to her specifically, how the industry treats people, the real shit.

Hi Kpopalypse,

After listening to Gfriend’s Mago, I wonder if its chorus can be categorized as double chorus like Rocket Punch’s Bim Bam Bum? Since Mago has two part chorus that don’t sound too connected, but not disjointed either and sounds perfectly fine if they just use one part solely. Upon this two choruses in one song, do you have any thought about this and is there any notable (Kpop or not) song use this approach?

And also I hate how they decide to end the song without “in the midnight” because it sounds incomplete lol but it kinds of reinforces me to repeat the song.

Anyway, thank you for reading and respond to this question! Hope you stay healthy and happy!

No, Mago is not a song with two choruses, Id say rather that it has one chorus that has two distinct parts (which is pretty common, for another example see Twice’s “Fancy“).  I really regret even bringing up the “two choruses” thing in an old blog post because ever since then every fan of every group that ever existed wants their group to now be the special snowflake group that has a two-chorus song and it’s really inane and nauseating just like the creepy gross obsession k-pop fans have with singing quality when your bias is almost always faking it anyway and nobody cares.

Hello Kpopalypse oppar.

I have been enjoying your blog since I started following kpop this summer. I’ve really learned a lot about the industry and I appreciate your honest (and satirical!) analysis of the kpop world and it’s high levels of production.

I have done something that you probably wouldn’t recommend, bought into an idol based on their manufactured personality. I’m talking about Twice’s Chaeyoung. I am a bi woman, so I have been trying to find what little representation I can for someone like me. I watched some very convincing youtube videos and just got the general vibe that she isn’t pure hetero, so I decided to stan. Anyway, when her recent dating rumors came out I was crushed. Obviously this is pretty irrational and I was pretty surprised that I reacted so strongly, but I’ve been upset about the fact that she might not actually be gay for the past few days. Mainly it was surprising since I felt like I’d been doing a good job not reading into fanservice and reality show personalities. How do I become less invested in finding the lgbt kpops?

In other news I really like Monster by Irene&Seulgi. It was a topic of conversation in my friend group whether the MV was queerbaiting or not. I felt super smart when I was able to tell my friends it was not since heterosexual men, not actual gays, are the target audience. Korea doesn’t care if the gays enjoy their sparkly kpop idols lol

Thanks for reading through this! I’ve been really liking your content especially your fanfic and music theory pieces. If you have the time could you do an analysis article on how YG produces Blackpink’s voices to sound so different that would be awesome!

I’m not sure why people want to find “representation” in an industry where everything is so obviously manufactured and constructed, it’s really just asking for trouble.  However I do see this tendency an awful lot, so you’re definitely not alone, but you’re also setting yourself up for one hell of a fall (as you found out).  Rest assured that many of them are LGBTIQXYZABC because that’s a large section of the population in general anyway, mathematically in each large k-pop group there’s going to be between zero and three non-straight people of some type.  However you’re never going to know who these people are.  Yves and Chuu might actually be gay for each other, or they could actually be a red herring because it’s really Hyunjin and Heejin who are boning and nobody wants you to know.  Who the fuck knows for sure, certainly not me, we won’t even know until a Loona staffer or ex-member writes that tell-all novel, but I think it’s fine to believe what you want as long as you don’t invest yourself in it.

Irene and Seulgi play on the lesbian theme in “Monster” because that’s what guys who like Irene and Seulgi enjoy seeing.  I’m not really into lesbian porn but I’m in the minority, their fans probably love that shit.

Blackpink’s voices only sound different because YG’s producers make no real effort to make them sound the same, they don’t use the “vocal soup” production style as often as other agencies do with girl groups.  However they’re not sounding all that different from each other anyway, if you listen to Blackpink’s song with Lady Gaga without knowing who is singing which parts, you may or may not mix up any of the Blackpink girls but you sure as hell won’t confuse any of them for Lady Gaga.  In western pop “difference” is much more highly valued.

Criminal gangs where I live are known to launder money through a network of bars, restaurants and take-aways. Do you think some kpop companies were and are set up for the purpose of laundering money? It seems quite likely to me but I’m curious about your take on this.

Yes

every time i try to hum loona’s voice, i end up singing t ara’s like the first time instead TT_TT

They’re pretty different.  Are you sure you’re not the tone-deaf person referred to earlier.

When you consider an album a good album? How many good tracks needs an album to be good and how many boring/bad/filler ones or do you prefer to do like an average-opinion of all the tracks?

I guess, the majority?  If I can get over 50% non-suck I think that’s a good enough ratio to be happy with my purchase.

Oppar, is it hypocritical that I consumed kpop female idols deepfakes regularly but I also easily become sad and angry whenever I read news about sexual assaults and rapes? Also, I think I’m a hypersexual, although I’m still pretty much a virgin. I’m confused.

What the fuck is hypersexual, I don’t even know but I think it’s possible to be [fill in the blank]sexual and also be a virgin.  Obviously a ton of people do consume deepfakes or there wouldn’t be such a big market for it, and contrary to popular belief it’s not just men consuming deepfakes of women either, that shit splits up into all possible gender configurations you can imagine.  I think porn is fantasy and it’s fine to fantasize, and questions about how “wrong” it is are irrelevant because people won’t stop making deepfakes now that the tech is there – if anything maybe deepfakes will get so good that they will give people who get busted in actual sexual situations a new “out”, certain idols could perhaps avoid their scandals altogether by claiming someone had deepfaked them.  Having said that I don’t really like deepfakes.  When watching porn I like actually knowing that the person I’m watching really did the thing, that’s part of the turn-on for me, so if I found out that it wasn’t really them but their head stapled onto someone else’s body that would actually be a huge turn-off.  I can imagine few things that would turn me off more.

completely agree with your comment about avoiding kpop appreciation clubs while in college, oppar. i was in a kpop dance team in college, and not that everyone is an ass (most people were quite nice), but there was an obvious increase in the number of people who are the obnoxious dramatic kpop twitter stan type compared to other clubs. there was drama over the possibility of STARTING DANCE AUDITIONS, ffs. it’s literally a bunch of noobs dancing but some people were getting mad the skill floor for the dance groups was too low (????) and the others mad since “holding auditions would be exclusionary” (??????). the whole thing was such a non issue. if the “skilled” people split off on their own with a “”pro”” group no one would care. And why should people get offended by auditions, jesus christ.

stay away from college kpop clubs, folks. stan kpopalypse instead

Anyone offended by a hobby club audition wouldn’t last ten minutes in the real k-pop idol world.  I hope none of those people actually want to become idols.

Hi Kpopalypse, what do you think about this?

He’s wrong, obviously.  According to Ben Shapiro music which doesn’t have melody, harmony and rhythm isn’t music, so I guess that rules out not only a bunch of rap music but also Edgard Varese’s “Ionisation“, Van Halen’s “Eruption” and this flute solo.  Zuby answers Ben pretty well and is basically correct so I don’t really feel the need to go over any of the rest of it.  Ben’s arguments aren’t really any different to what people said in the 1950s about rock and roll, that it was “jungle music”, “just screaming” etc.  To his credit at least he seems like he’s trying to understand, Ben would actually do well to do more videos along these lines where he basically says to a guest “here are my ignorant beliefs, now tear them down for me” and the guest happily obliges, he’s pretty ignorant in general so he’s probably got enough material for at least a couple hundred of these videos.

confused 20 year old

I got your thing, thanks for sending it, but I haven’t published it at your request.  If you still want an answer just message me privately and I’ll answer privately.  Use a burner account if you wish to remain anon.

I know you don’t review J-pop but you have reviewed japanese songs by korean groups and also liked some so Its just to stay on brand?

It’s because 99.99% of j-pop stinks.  I’ve covered this before countless times.  If it’s actually “k-pop in japan” instead (i.e driven by the Korean industry, like a Korean artist releasing for the Japanese market, or something like Niziu) then I consider that k-pop and will look at it as such, however when they co-opt typical Japanese pop song writing techniques instead of bringing in their own sound it typically all falls to shit.  Having said that, even if I wanted to cover j-pop (which I totally don’t) it would be nearly impossible for me to do so with any quality or consistency just because j-pop is mostly so hard to access outside of Japan, so it’s best to just not bother anyway.  Fuck it – not worth.

I’m being very obviously overworked ever since making the shift to working from home, and I’m at a crossroads on what to do about it.

I started my new job at an ad agency in early March and my country went into lockdown 1-2 weeks later. 100% of my job is done on my laptop anyway plus I’m a homebody, so I wasn’t phased by it at all in the beginning – I get to save on travel time, take a shit in my own toilet & have Netflix/YouTube tabs open without nosy managers trying to spy on my (totally SFW) online activity? Sounded like heaven to me!

But as the months wore on, we had a change in upper management & the new manager, A, is a massive, annoying cunt. He was silent under the older manager B (a chill guy & a good worker) but grew claws the minute manager B left and he was promoted to the top. Suddenly we went from good creative work with a reasonable work-life balance to staying up till 2-3 am each night on what was essentially grunt work with endless bullshit revisions.

Management began promising clients immediate turnaround for every single job, piling them on even when we were already packed full – I protested against these unreasonable work schedules once and was told I had a “bad attitude” towards this business, that this is how advertising is & I should quit if I’m so lazy & unwilling to become a lifeless corporate drone basically. How they expect original creative work from overworked employees too tired to think straight is beyond me.

Not only do they expect insane hours now that I can’t just get up and leave like I could in an office, but they also suck so bad at delivering briefs that half the time they just send emails, ask the team to read through them, and leave the clueless creative team members to do the explaining among themselves because they just don’t want to take the time to get a proper explanation from the clients themselves.

When we send work through based off of what we understood from the mails, we get reprimanded for “not understanding the brief correctly” when we were never given a proper rundown to begin with.

Well, this mistreatment has led many team members to turn in their papers. The finance manager quit last week, a designer will leave next week, and the 2 Creative Directors will be gone by mid-December.

I would have gladly joined them, but I’m worried about quitting now since I’m only 8 months in & I want to finish a year before doing so – I’ve got a lot of jobs in my resume that only lasted a couple of months & I fear leaving yet another one before sticking it out a year will be a massive red flag to future employers, especially since none of them were “temp” jobs to begin with. On the other hand, I’m not sure whether I can endure 4 more months of this abuse.

What do you think I should do?

Leave.  If your resume already looks like crap, one more strike won’t make much difference.  However try and line up a new job before leaving your existing, if possible – that will help you a lot, it’ll give you a better position during interview.  Just be prepared to answer the question “how do we know you’ll stick with us” because I guarantee you that if your next employers are doing the interview correctly, that question will come up.

Hi Kpopalypse,

Actually, I did some research about Audio Engineering as a discipline. Even though it is a legacy term when you *have* to be an Electrical Engineer to record audio, a modern audio engineer still needs to know the basics of acoustics (a branch of physics) and signal processing (a sub-discipline within Electrical Engineering) as part of the job. So yeah, you definitely knows enough mathematics to count how many girls are in Loona 😉 Speaking of Loona, I found this fanfic on AO3 a while ago:  Mind to tell me what’s your opinion on it?

When I came up with the terms of settlement, I knew you would come up with some forms of malicious compliance, and I must say you didn’t disappoint me 🙂 BTW, rather than “The most controversial k-pop blogger in the history of k-pop”, I think you should just put “The k-pop equivalent of Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins/Sam Harris”. I hate saying this, but the more I learned about k-pop fandoms, the more it reminded me of this video

I also want to add something about objectification. Being a native Chinese speaker, I noticed that some Chinese k-pop fandoms are a bit more tolerant towards objectification – provided you didn’t sexualize them to the point of you’re no longer recognize them as humans. I don’t think you had crossed that line, but I can understand why some people think you’re just a misogynist equipped with active camouflage, because you would have no shortage of misogynistic (to borrow a phrase from Gordon Ramsay) first-class cunts that engages in similar behavior on this planet, and the line between objectification that doesn’t have a misogynistic undertone and objectification that does can be quite blurred. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I don’t really care about “erotic fanfiction”, especially stuff with a BDSM theme, fine if it floats your boat I guess but I find it all a bit silly, not to mention unhealthy because it’s still all part of putting idols on a weird pedestal of adoration (just a different one to usual).  That’s why my Yves/Chuu computer games deliberately take the piss out of this sort of thing, by describing any sexual activity as blandly, matter-of-factly and as G-rated as humanly possible (an obvious point that went right over the Loona Reddit mods’ heads when they banned the first game from their sub, which is why I then relentlessly took the piss out of them), and it’s also why previous fanfictions that I’ve written with sexual content always completely sidestep any sexual activity.

The “most controversial k-pop blogger in the history of k-pop” title isn’t something I invented, it’s a quote from someone on k-pop reddit, which I read and then thought “okay so I’ve never thought about that before, but that’s probably true”. 

You can see the original here.  I’m still looking for that blog about glass, by the way. 

oi cunt

How do I learn to have motivation for anything? I keep getting told I have so much potential, I’m so smart, I’m so pretty, I’m so athletic blah blah blah. For the past few years my mind has been completely blurry and I can barely think straight for more than 20 minutes at a time (most likely from build up of mildly traumatic incidents). The fact that people keep on complimenting me on something I spent nearly zero effort on makes it even worse, because I look at (for example) one of my art projects or maths homework and everyone says its so amazing. But I think I could’ve done so much better and I notice all the little mistakes or things that could be improved upon if I had more motivation to complete it more efficiently or spent more than an hour on it.

I’ve probably subconsciously built up the idea that I can half-ass my life if my low efforts are as good as “dumber” people’s full effort. But this is such a toxic mindset and I hate it. I’m scared that one day I’ll just stop caring entirely and nothing will matter anymore.

Not caring about what others think is a good first step.  Often I say that to people in the context of criticism, but it applies equally to praise.  Schoolwork is just schoolwork anyway, unless it’s the final year you just have to pass and get through to the next step, the actual marks don’t matter.  It’s actually a good thing to not care about the things that don’t matter – just remember to save that care factor for the things that do.  I don’t care that much about my university grades, but I do care about writing a blog that I like to read and that I’m happy with.  We’re all taught to care about everything all the time, but that’s unrealistic and not possible anyway.  Use your care factor more judiciously and you’ll get more value out of it.

why don’t kpop stans shit on RBW the way they shit on Mamamoo? Their company is even more to blame for the screw ups and lack of quality control: musical & cultural disappointments. They screwed over Esna. Why didn’t they have someone stand up and say “hold on stop that’s a really bad idea” before putting their idol group in blackface

I wouldn’t know.  For all I know maybe they do.  I know I certainly have.

Have you ever play Kanye quest 3030?

No because I couldn’t find a download link for it that worked and didn’t redirect me to some German porn site or whatever but I’ve heard it’s great.  I’m sure at the very least it’s better than every song Kanye ever produced.

Hey Kpopalypse, I’m the person with the online friend problem, I think my feeling was right, they ended up being nice, but we had differing opinions on certain topics. We ended up stepping on each other’s insecurities too often. I felt peeved since I thought they were talking down to me and they were exasperated when they thought I was telling them what they were. It took us a while to realize that we were misreading each other’s messages after they told me about their bipolar disorder and I told them about my emotional abuse. In the end, we kept misunderstanding each other and we didn’t know how to make the relationship work so we eventually stopped talking. I’m sad it didn’t work out, but sometimes life is like that. Thank you.

Such is life.  No problem.

Hello, how are you doing? I’ve been following you since I was in middle school and now I’m in college . I like your way of writing. I like your way of being straightforward in giving comments.

Now, I would like to ask your opinion on the way Kpop business makes fans acting like they got full time job to support their idols. Like, I need to stream their videos all the time during the comeback season, vote them on every platform, stream their contents religiously and all those related things or else, others would regard me as less of a fans. When I tried telling them that they should tone it down as they’re treating all those activities like a job or something, they will accuse me of not being supportive enough of the idols. What should I say then? They’re the one who took Kpop so seriously but I’m the weird one out here? In my opinion, streaming is not something that I am fond of. They’re literally inflating the view and not in a honest way summore. Watching & repeating the videos & music because you love it is different to zombie streaming isn’t it? Same goes to voting for nonsensical awards that means shit and literally wasting your time on ads (I did this once and realized that I’m being tricked to share my information for a survey in exchange for voting tokens). That’s the worst thing that entertainment companies do. Anyway, if fans can stop doing all this bullshits and meaningless things, that’s the only thing I can ask for. And, I hope that you can consider my question to be answer. I’m sorry for the long rants tho.Thank you.

K-pop fandoms are basically a cult.  They mostly don’t care about music, they care about being in a club together and about all liking the same thing which unites them.  That’s why any criticism, however benign, is seen as terribly offensive, it’s like you’re trying to break up the club.  Music doesn’t matter to these people – sure, it matters as “the next thing to be excited by” but it’s the adulation of the idols that’s the real deal for these fans, not the actual music itself.  If music was even a factor, why would they tell you to support their favourite group’s next comeback before they know what it sounds like?  My advice is to keep your distance from these brainwashed people.  I’ve always put myself at arm’s length from fandoms, although more recently I don’t even have to try – my reputation now precedes me and zombie fans will mostly automatically keep their distance.  If you find yourself going against “the party line” even a little (“I like this song but not as much as one they did before”) you will be shunned.  That’s how these people work and why I’ve never really called myself a “fan” of any group, even though I do enjoy the output of a lot of groups as well as their image-crafting sometimes.  A lot of people seem to have trouble understanding this distinction (or they just pretend they have trouble understanding it so they can attack the strawman of me as a “hater of fans” or “hater of group x” or “edgy” or whatever other view of me they want to push) but I think it’s pretty easy to grasp for anyone with common sense who is reading these things in good faith.

There are songs that you know that were good and you even put in your favourite lists but you listened few times?

I try not to flog songs to death if I like them so I don’t get sick of them!  But most stuff I like I have heard a fair few times.  If it’s really good I don’t have to force myself to listen a lot.

So you probably heard about of the Tao x IU situation which took place a few days ago at the time of writing this. I just wanted to know why is IU so popular? Is it her music? Is it her public image(nation’s sister)?Or her looks? You’re a wanker yourself kpopalypse, who’d know better than you?

(And you’re probably the only one I can ask this question because people around me don’t give fucks about kpop and asking kpop stans will fill my social media with pseudo-feminst , objectification/sexualization rants.)

She has a very good songwriter behind her, I think that’s a lot of it.  All her big hits are written by the same guy.  Also looks are definitely part of it too, I’m sure IU learned in her debut performance where the audience of fangirls of other groups greeted her with pig snorts, just how much Korean society values appearances.  The public image of course plays into that because there’s no way that public image would work without her looking the way she did.  It was only when she was made to pander to uncle fans that her popularity really started increasing.  IU always hated the “Nation’s little sister” tag and has admitted as much in interviews, but it’s also quite obvious in a lot of her newer songs that it’s taken its toll on her.

Oppar, what exactly constitutes a “ballad”? Is it the slower tempo? The instrument choices? The vocal production? Or something else? Or a combination of things?

Also, can this song be considered a ballad? Coz if it is, then it sure is the ultimate k-pop ballad all k-pop ballads aspire to be and fail miserably time and time again.

Conversation about ballads here.

The Loona song is not a ballad.

Good evening or
Good morning kpopalypse

I apologize, if I offended you regarding the northern hemisphere thing, that is why I mentioned morning and evening. I am the girl that asks you ( at least once in a year) about underground or about bad rappers.

I have two questions. This is meant as a kpop question and not as a jpop question, but if it is too japanese, then please ignore it.

I found a song that has many rappers. Two of them are koreans (uneducated kid and Futuristic Swaver) and the other two of them are from Japan. They also put two DJ in the title. One of the korean rapper is “Uneducated Kid”. He mentions that he is using drugs in the song. I don’t mention the song (or using the link), because I don’t want to disrespect your rules.

My question is kinda weird, but can’t he get problems with the korean justice system or something similar? I remember that rappers in certain countries can get to jail, if they rap or sing about a criminal offense. Theset stuff can be traced as far as I see.

The other question related to the song:

Kpop groups do regularly collaborations with international artists, but I rarely see that with korean rappers. Is there a particular reason or are they just too high and rich, because of their parents and they aren’t really interested about it? It is kinda weird to see that most of these rappers are actually from rich families, so their songs about starting from a botton or something similar sounds really lame in hindsight. It feels like comedy.

Rappers talk a lot of shit, that’s part of the style.  It doesn’t mean any of it really happened.  “Gangster rappers” tend to write about what they’ve seen or heard about happening in their neighbourhood rather than what they’ve specifically done.  The smart ones know it’s just the art of telling gritty, realistic stories that have a grain of truth but also a lot of poetic licence because that’s the art of storytelling and who is going to verify it anyway.  The ones who believe their own hype and actually try to live the lifestyles they rap about, they find themselves regretting it very quickly.  This weeds out a lot of amateurs and second-rate artists actually.  Anyone with half a brain in their head knows that rap is often “realistic” but not often “real”, not when talking about very serious crimes anyway.  If we just are talking about smoking a bit of weed or having sex, then yeah that’s more like their true lifestyle, but they exaggerate like fuck there too.  I remember Ice-T (who would know) wrote in one of his books something like “if all rappers really played the moves that they rap about, they wouldn’t have any dicks left”.  Further discussion about rap here.

Korean rappers collab with rappers from other places where they can, but it’s probably just not an opportunity that’s open to many of them.  I bet more of them wish they could but remember South Korea is very geographically isolated, and also I’m sure there’s racism that plays a factor.

Hi Oppar

I have you have adjusted to the new league items by the time you answer this, you’ve got a month. I find myself honestly growing to like them a bit more by the day.

Anyway, do you have any tips to perhaps be a bit more chill towards others? I find myself increasingly impatient and tired-of-people’s-bullshit by the day, like I get annoyed more often nowadays. This happens especially often in social gatherings (eg. when people are late).

I have 2 social situations in which I wanna see what you’d do.

1. There’s this one trans girl in my gay group that frequents our meetup (it’s a board game meetup but that will only be relevant on the second case). She talks like trolls on the internet, but doesn’t fucking stop even though it imo gets fucking annoying. Whenever someone talks about something, she jumps in and answer it in a troll, completely bullshit way as a joke with a straight face, but goes on this tangent for longer than it should be. Eg. someone was talking about birds, and she would say stuff like “did you know birds hate a certain group of people”, then depending on the answers she would keep making up bullshit about birds for a while and this repeats many times during that gathering.

I’m all for sarcastic and troll answers but this fucking tranny just doesn’t know how to stop. Shit is only funny for like the first 10 minutes. Whenever she does it all attention goes to her and it’s tilting af because I actually wanna hear what other people has got to say too. At some point later during the meetup I actually told her “yeah ok, can we move on?” because I got so sick of her doing it. How do you tell her to stfu without being rude?

2. I know you hate board games but try to ignore that for this bit lol. So the reason for gathering is board game, it’s board game night after all. But it seems like for all the trouble I had to gather people around, it just became a normal social meetup with MAAYBE some board games.

Instead of gathering around for a game after the dinner we had at the house (we were waiting for players), people were forming another circle doing some lame music shit instead. In that circle someone BARELY plays a guitar and everyone else seem to be trying to see what he could play etc, at some point I kid you not someone starts vocal fagging over the shit guitar cover of a funeral paced song, it was awful. Anyway people eventually come over to the table and we played and ignored the rest who didnt have any interest of gaming. They eventually joined like the last 30 minutes.

This baffles me so much. Why do people do that? I’d assume that if the night is called board gaming or gaming night, the focus would be gaming no? Wouldn’t you be disappointed if you’re promised a movie night, but the movie part just becomes the after thought? If it’s supposed to be a vocal-faggotry night I wouldn’t have been so tilted.

I don’t mind the new League items, but I have a lot more trouble navigating the shop now.  The “recommended” stuff is cool but I feel like there isn’t an easy way to just “see everything” now, or if there is I haven’t found it yet.

The trans girl – If you can stand to watch it, see how much of this absolutely cringeworthy horrible interview session you can get through.

John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten from The Sex Pistols/PIL fame basically just will not fucking shut up, he’s clearly drunk as fuck plus he’s still reeling from the recent death of his partner when this was shot.  Marky Ramone handles John the wrong way – the fight starts at 11:40 if you want to skip there.  Henry Rollins handles it the right way, specifically from 2:16 but also elsewhere.  So does Donita Sparks from L7 not long after the Marky/John fight.  They both defuse the situation with humour and redirection.  Of course they don’t stop John Lydon from talking (who the fuck can) but they certainly make their own voices heard successfully without starting any major issues.  Telling someone to shut up is understandable, but telling someone to shut up in ways that don’t belittle them is better.

The movie night – for a social event that has more than a few people, you need a leader who can co-ordinate everyone.  Split-offs like that happen because of a lack of strong leadership.  Strong doesn’t mean “rude”, but it does mean “assertive”.  The leader doesn’t have to be you but it has to be somebody – it’s that person’s task to bring the two groups together.

do you stan QRI, do I stan QRI, IDK

We all stan Qri.

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That’s all for QRIMOLE for 2020!  This series will return in the new year!  In the meantime don’t forget to email genshin_cs@mihoyo.com and complain about the lack of mouse Y axis invert in Genshin Impact!

Oh, and do you have a question that you’d like to see answered in the next episode of QRIMOLE?  If so, use the question box below, or if no box appears, click the Qri on the sidebar to open the box as a separate webpage!  Kpopalypse will return!