some peoples think that the desert is all dead and empty and sand and holes, but that's not all true. in the desert there's stuff!! but not a lot of it, because it's so hot all of times. so you got little water, little grass and rice and like... ferns and stuff, and little animals!! because if you're little you don't need a whole lot of stuff to live. that's where the funky fudge comes in. the funny fax is a little kind of guy who's like the orange county voops, but put all his size points into him ears. when you're a little guy you only gotta dig a little hole to live in, nice and lazy like, but it means everybody lives in a hole. furry fudge can't see through sand but he can find his prey by listening real hard. prey gets its name because it's real preymitive and dumb and that makes it okay to eat, so the flirty phone listens hard for little bitty arguments from tiny guys that don't know how to talk to their ladies the right way like Fresh Flatsteak the stoned age guy, and then they digdigdig into that little hole and it's snacktime for floppy foot!! those big trangulator ears are also good for catching wind and cooling off so they little brains don't overheat. they got a lot of thinking to do: how do i build a cellular tower?? how do i phone home?? little alien voops, they're like... Greys, man. kinda creepy when they stare at you. anyway, that's why fender foes is bestfavourite animal okayBYE

the "you seem weird and cool, ergo follows" approach has worked the hell out! love love love seeing all the awesome strange

You can do anything at cohost dot org.

Anything at all.

#    #there may in fact be limits to what you can do

anything

anything

I finally have my guitar strings and can finally start learning to play >:3c

irony is the cowards way to enjoy things

be courageous, be sincere.

and most of all

be fucking weird with it

I used it as a shield for so long, but all it actually protected me from is joy. I was terrified of being cringe but all I was cringing away from was my own happiness.

Be loud, be weird, be unapologetic. So long as you respect boundaries and prevent harm, so long as you give yourself grace that overcoming shame is a process, so long as you keep in mind you are a creature and need to make sure your nest is comfortable and warm and your needs are met.

Be authentic, and fuck limiting yourself for the sake of the programming society shoved into your head.

In important corollary to this vital lesson that can take some time for folks to internalize is that courageously and sincerely loving something is not the same as doing so uncritically. Your emotions do not obligate you to an interpretation, and when the two feel like they're in tension, that's interesting.

Case in point: For a variety of reasons (cost, time, broadcast resolutions, etc.), older TV has tons of continuity errors, especially when it comes to action sequences. Think Riker on ST:tNG running while carrying someone and his phaser gets knocked out of its holster, only to reappear in the next shot. In my opinion, those sorts of errors rule, actually. I don't watch an episode of television and forget that it's fiction, any more than I would watch a play and wonder "Oh geez, when will the characters realize they're on a stage in front of dozens or hundreds of people?!" The imperfections don't take me out of the story, they're breadcrumbs that help me understand how the art was made in the first place. They let me connect with the characters at one level and the actors at another (and woe betide those who conflate the two).

An additional benefit of loving art both sincerely and honestly is that it makes it much easier to cultivate empathy and understanding for people who feel very differently about the same work. If your take is, "This rules, I love it," and someone else's is, "This sucks, it made me feel awful," there's a good chance you've missed something, either in the work itself or in the wider cultural context. Taking those criticisms on board need not be a recipe for poisoning your love for things - we should love things for what they are, not for what we need them to be. You'll almost certainly still like the thing, but with more nuanced and complete understanding of the work in context. A community that champions sincere love is not only stronger than one that polices opinions, doing so also fosters a wider and deeper pool of community knowledge that everyone benefits from.

Gonna piggyback on Belarius's point (though this may balloon past the scope of the original chost) and say that the capability to love things while still being critical of them is vital for media literacy and critical thinking, in addition to being vital to one's mental health and general ability to enjoy things. Enjoyment of media does not equate to endorsement of anything that media portrays. Hell, creation of media does not equate to endorsement of anything that media portrays, either! Otherwise, the people who make movies like Saw wouldn't make them, or else they would have but the movies would not have been as successful as they are, and the creators might even be in trouble for having made them, depending on how far along the natural dystopian progression of such a hypothetical we want to take this.

This is one of my biggest issues with the purity culture that seems to be developing in a lot of online spaces, seemingly especially ones that skew towards younger demographics. If you police what people are allowed to enjoy, and if you take their preferences to mean that they agree uncritically with/endorse all the things portrayed in the things they like, over time "I like this" becomes equated with "this is objectively good" becomes equated with "this is morally good" becomes equated with "liking this is indicative of one's good moral character" (or "disliking this is an indicator of one's poor moral character), and vice versa. You see this all the time on platforms like Tumblr and TikTok (though the latter I hear about only secondhand, since I don't use TikTok myself). Something can be mostly good but flawed, or mostly bad but with good parts. Something can be entirely bad but still enjoyable to experience (think movies that are So Bad It's Good), or entirely good but not enjoyable to experience (think movies that are emotionally compelling but too heartwrenching to watch more than once). None of these are reasons to police your own or anyone else's opinions of the thing in question.

Nuance is present in all things. You can like something you disagree with, you can dislike something you agree with, and there are almost always¹ more than two sides to an argument. Nothing¹ is black-and-white (and in the general case¹, there are usually edge cases where two reasonable and good people will disagree even on things that do seem black-and-white). It is incredibly important to be able to criticize your darlings and to be able to accept others' criticisms of the same. It is equally important to be able to praise the things you hate, and accept others' praise of the same. And, to tie back to OP's original point, irony is not necessary to justify liking things that aren't Perfect and is indeed a less healthy way to like things than it would be to like them unironically². This goes for ideological disagreements as well as disagreements over media and popular culture, but that's beyond the scope of this chost.³

1. Not counting extreme situations, edge cases, or, like, actually objective facts people don't seem to believe in (such as the existence of COVID-19). I'm not saying that there isn't a right and a wrong answer to shit like "bigotry is bad" or "people deserve rights" but again, ideological disagreements and criticisms are outside the scope of this chost and not what I'm talking about here. That's not to say that you shouldn't approach ideology with nuance in mind, too--you absolutely should, both ideologies you disagree with and ones you hold dear!--but I've derailed this chost enough already.

2. Hell, when it comes to enjoying media, you don't even need to justify why you like something. You're allowed to enjoy shit without having to rationalize why, but you still have a responsibility to acknowledge its nuance and engage critically with it.

3. The more of this I write, the more I'm realizing that all of my addition is arguably outside the scope of this chost, but I don't have the energy to split it off into a separate chost and add in the context it would lose by not being attached to the above contributions from F. Zoe Blackheart, Sylvia Lilith, and Belarius. I'm also not going to address the elephant in the room of purity culture's impulse to censor anything deemed "impure", because that is well outside the scope of this chost even including my addition to it, and would deserve to be its own chost anyway rather than an addition to a chost about allowing yourself to love things unironically.

Fucking hijack it!

I love reading shit like this.