satellite cult 44.44
identity aquarium, lolcow, ace attorney
welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope my disciples forgive the absence of last week’s edition. a space/time portal trapped me within the void of a blank Google Slides presentation, and my only means of escape was the construction of a deck proposing a new marketing strategy for a mid-sized tech start up. i freed myself, but at what cost?
please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs.
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want more music recs? here’s my Bandcamp collection.
glass heaven
starting us off this week is a piece of cosmic bitcrushed mallsoft by glass heaven, the first release from the ARIAMIS collective. this EP delivers the type of celestial liminality only experienced by staring up through the skylight of a mall corridor or a luxury hotel lobby into a clear blue sky, producing the illusion of a perfectly azure ceiling.
Identity Aquarium
this deeply distorted, barely recognizable take on the A side of Chuck Person’s Ecco Jams Vol. 1 is just as mesmerizing as the source material, but in this case it feels haunting and sludgy, almost sinister, with the addition of noise and grunge elements. the six tracks are highly repetitive, clocking in at around 10 minutes each, and they are stretched and slowed like the drip of a radioactive green slime.
ハッピー丸薬
the title of this single by E C C O H A Z E translates (loosely, or perhaps literally?) to “happy pills.” appropriately, it’s a hazy, melancholy slushwave release that incorporates vaportrap and calls back to classic eccojams. this track isn’t the titular happy pill, but rather the thing that comes before it: numb, foggy, bouts of depression that force days and weeks and months to blend together indiscernibly.
Immortal Adventure
if you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a lolcow, the 4chan-born title bestowed upon those who can be “milked for the lolz,” or, in other words, someone online whose reactions to provocations make them highly exploitable by trolls.1
if you’re a little less of the web, your exposure to the term likely came via news coverage of Kiwi Farms and the targeted harassment of Keffals, but the word lolcow dates back to at least 2007 and was most notably popularized through the harassment and trolling of Christine Weston Chandler,2 whose life Kiwi Farms was originally established to document.
in recent years, a persistent link between transgender people and lolcows has formed; as places like Kiwi Farms and lolcow.farm began to veer more and more explicitly far right, catering to TERFs and the MAGA crowd, trans people online became increasingly frequent targets of their ire.
this album, Immortal Adventure, is by someone who appears to be trans fem and simply goes by lolcow, a statement analogous to the reclamation of a slur.
the music itself blends synthwave, slushwave, and house into an ambient journey that pulses and flows.
ドルフィンオアシス 𖦹
this plundered album by Ctrl ティッカー sounds like dolphin filled Geocities pages and Lisa Frank.
requiem for two devices
a single 10 minute track out on net label what explosions do to the body, known for releasing experimental EDM and meme music, this collage and commentary on contemporary digital spaces is by Jimmy Donaldson, except of course it isn’t—Jimmy Donaldson is none other than MrBeast.
blinkies
Neocities and Tumblr user baconspider made these cool blinkies.
objection!
speaking of Phoenix Wright, here are some fan-made pages:
Ace Attorney Archive is now itself an archived site, last updated a year ago. it’s incomplete, or perhaps it once was, but it features collections of some doujinshi and is formatted much like a classic Geocities-built fan site.
court-records.net is an Ace Attorney fan site that has been active since 2006 and is still active as of at least June 2023, complete with forums.
void dive
wanna see more art? explore my Void Plaza gallery.
C'est de la merde by stulka
_INTERNET CAT_ by ex_mortal_
𝙀𝙢𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙑𝙪𝙡𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 by Blotter
thank you for joining me. until next time.
it goes without saying that i think trolling lolcows usually constitutes harassment. there’s a difference between following an eccentric online personality and torturing them until they lose all sense of reality, or to the point where they’re being placed in danger. some lolcows are genuinely fascinating and some are terrible people who might pique your sense of morbid curiosity, but many are also targeted for abuse simply because they are autistic, transgender, left wing, fat, or just “weird.” the definition of a lolcow has changed a lot over the past decade. i don’t condone interacting with or provoking lolcows. even the Chris-Chan wiki (the CWCiki) instructs users to “observe Christory. don’t make Christory.”
if you somehow don’t know about Chris-Chan, she is often considered the most documented person on the internet, and that documentation spans over a decade. it’s a very long and very sad story, mostly rooted in 4chan trolls mercilessly harassing an autistic person. be prepared to be incredibly upset if you choose to learn more about her.