Welcome back to Saturday! I actually feel very strange about this, because in my head it was Tuesday like 20 minutes ago. Such a (personally, though maybe for you too) strange week. I didn’t even get to post anything! We do still have some good items from last week to get to, not to mention more recent material (like from today!), so the lull will only be a brief annoyance. I also have like five Let’s Discover Some Idols to finish, oops.

So yeah, this is usually the spot where I try to add something peppy and link it to idols and then we go on with our lives. That’s been tough the last several weeks as this disaster of a year goes from “hilariously bad” to “okay seriously have we actually been in the Bad Place this entire time?” It’s tough to spin things that might make you feel better, and I completely understand that. I just want you to know that whatever it is for you — fly fishing or restoring daguerreotypes or whatever it is that the youngs enjoy these days — if you’re feeling down, you should do it. And there are constructive, meaningful things you can do if you feel compelled to action. None of this has to do with idol if it doesn’t, though of course it can. And, at the end of the day, there are people who care about you and want things to be good for you.

Now, you may have expected that we’d do something fun or weird or whatever for this, the 200th consecutive iteration of the world’s longest-running serialized throwaway content accumulation post in major North American J-idol blogging history, and I thought about it, but I thought we can do better. The fourth anniversary of the Weekender is now eight weeks away, and then it’s basically Best Of season, and then it’s a mere hop-skip-jump to the fifth anniversary of Homicidols Dot Com. There are much cooler and better things to celebrate! So let’s do those instead. Continue reading →