Birb

I am Aquagaze (Aqua for short), a 31-year-old teenager from Belgium. During the day, I teach English as a second language to high schoolers. At night, I attempt to validate my existence through the consumption of popular media and to satisfy my compulsive need to be found interesting. I intend to use this Cohost page (blog?) to gather all of my thoughts that are too long for Twitter, too relevant for Discord and too, err, sensical for Tumblr. Expect a lot of unapologetically leftist politics.

My interests:

First and foremost, I adore stories, generally those that can appeal to the gut, the heart, the imagination and the brain in equal measure. Unfortunately, due to a variety of boring intersecting reasons of the psychological kind, I have a very hard time actually consuming stories. I am incredibly sensitive to the impression that a story is wasting my time, and seeing as the majority of Western television seems to be designed to do exactly that, I don't exactly see eye to eye with Netflix, Disney+, HBO and the the like. When I do manage to actually watch something, it's usually thanks to the extrinsic motivation of watching it with friends. I am trying to change this and get more stuff done by myself, and you can keep track of my thoughts on the films and series I've watched by following me on Letterboxd.

Anyway, as my friends and I tend to watch a lot of anime and tokusatsu when we hang out, most of the media I do consume hails from Japan. This has caused me pick up an interest in the country, its culture and its history that reaches far beyond the usually very limited impression you get from anime. It's made me appreciate the medium more, but also made me incredibly resentful of it. I can't shake the feeling that most anime is perishable garbage, and the industry is so rife with reprehensible practices and regressive values, a critical mind and a sceptical eye are required when engaging with it. Luckily, I've found a lovely group of people who share this love-hate relationship with the medium, and we usually share our spicy opinions over on our blog, The Glorio Blog. It has a podcast that I'm on occasionally!

I'm also very much into music, especially the kinds one would describe as "alternative", regardless of the actual genre. The kind of music I see myself returning to most often is what I would call "atmospheric, emotional rock" — basically everything that exists at the intersection of, like, Radiohead, Deftones, and My Chemical Romance — but overall I think I have a pretty open mind. I'll listen to pretty much anything as long as it's honest, from Fuck Buttons to Taylor Swift, though one look at my Spotify playlists will probably tell you that my tastes, however broad, tend heavily towards dark, melancholy, and... err, recent. What can I say? I like following the industry from up close and learning how up-and-coming artists are building on what came before more than I like revisiting the past.

Furthermore, I spend a lot of free time playing video games. I'm not sure if I actually like them as a medium — I wouldn't call myself a gamer in the same way I wouldn't really call myself an "anime fan", given the implications — but they give me a dopamine rush that help stave off the boredom that often incapacitates me and deliver stories to me in a way that requires me to properly engage with them, which is a nice added bonus. Immersion, interaction and exploration are what I look for in a video game, and I have a borderline unreasonable aversion to playing with others, especially strangers. As a result I pretty much exclusively play single-player, story-driven RPGs, which I generally play through very slowly and comprehensively. Some of my favourites include the Legend of Zelda series, the Life is Strange series, JRPGs like Persona, Kingdom Hearts, Xenoblade Chronicles and Final Fantasy, adventure games like the Ace Attorney series or the Zero Escape series, immersive sims like Deus Ex and Dishonored, and "character action" games like Devil May Cry. Aside from that, I also like collecting board games, though I should probably actually play them more often.

If you like some or all of these things, we should be friends!

My creative endeavours:

• I tend to share my opinion even when no one likes to hear it, so I do try to write every once in a while. As mentioned before, I have been writing for The Glorio Blog for the last decade, usually on anime, tokusatsu and Japanese music, as well as being a recurring guest on their podcast, The Glorio Chat. For a recent (?) sample of some of my finest (?) pieces, look no further than my first impressions post of Love Live! Superstar!! or my review of Studio Ghibli's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

• I made a very short visual novel in 2022, called Nothing Special, which you can download and play over here.

• I am also a member of Mitakihara Original, an ambitious collaborative writing project that is kind of a mix between forum role-playing and fan fiction, set in the universe of my favourite anime series of all time, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Rather than the kind of mad-libs improv you'd associate with role-playing, however, Mitakihara Original is a scripted story that we simply happen to deliver in a rather unique way, i.e. through every character posting from their own Twitter account. Yes, that's exactly as impractical as it sounds, but we've been doing it for more then a decade, so why stop now?