Kiterature Review

AKA, "Norvid gets some fucking explanations"

Some say I'm deliberately obscurantist, and, when I get the chance to use multiple layers of indirection to make a point, I grab it with both hands and squeeze the metaphorical life out of it. Some are occasionally true, but most of the (many) misunderstandings of my xeets are due to the fact that I mentally inhabit a spiderweb of references that constantly ping each other to dredge up old memories and connect them with current events, or to spin interactions into interesting¹ ideas (e.g.). However, this doesn't make them any clearer, so I decided to go through Norvid's xeets and look for all the ones where he asks me what the fuck I'm on about, and then explain them in no particular order. I found fifteen, but there are probably more, frankly.

It's cap anyway cuz all you have to do is mentally type the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and you're like 90% of the way there

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 22, 2025

It's cap anyway cuz all you have to do is mentally type the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and you're like 90% of the way there

This was in response to a quoted xeet noting that the author couldn't draw a QWERTY keyboard from memory despite being a quick and accurate typist. I ignored Norvid's Calvin and Hobbes commentary to dunk on the quoted Xeeter:

• "It's cap anyway" - he's lying/incorrect
• "all you have to do is mentally type the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is the standard sentence for rendering every letter in the English alphabet; in this case, you use it as a mnemonic to associate the keys pressed while touch-typing. This is a reference to an exercise I did when I was learning to type (passed down from my mother, who learned to type on actual typewriters); in the absence of a keyboard, one takes a phrase and mimes typing it out, visualizing the keyboard and tapping their fingers on a table or their legs in the approximate position of the correct key.
• "you're like 90% of the way there" - acknowledging the fact that QWERTY keyboards include number and symbol keys (a silent but present comment: there aren't that many of them and they're easy to remember if you use them with any frequency.)

Time to hop on genshin
Get ready to whale for my main bitch Lisa and backup bitch Ning "Rock and/or Roll" Guang, along with Judge MTG and the Bookworm Twink

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 2, 2025

Time to hop on genshin

Get ready to whale for my main bitch Lisa and backup bitch Ning "Rock and/or Roll" Guang, along with Judge MTG and the Bookworm Twink

This one is a bit more obscure and requires Genshin Impact lore knowledge, and perhaps a sprinkling of Kitlore. This was in response to a comment over lumping and splitting in video game production, which cycles between combining a bunch of features into a single game (lumping) and making games based around single, simple core mechanics (splitting). I noted that games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact (via Miliastra Wonderland) were implementing Roblox-like features. Norvid, not being a Genshin, Fortnite, or Roblox player, expressed his ignorance, and this was my response.

• "Time to hop on genshin" - facetious exhortation to start playing the game to see what I was on about
• "Get ready to whale" - i.e., spend large amounts of money on the character slot machine
• "my main bitch Lisa" - Lisa Minci, Librarian of the Knights of Favonius, and my primary waifu in Genshin.

• "backup bitch Ning "Rock and/or Roll" Guang" - a few layers here. Ningguang is my "backup" waifu, i.e. second-favorite², and "Rock and/or Roll" is a riff on "rock and roll" (the music genre) combined with her status as a Geo character (whose elemental power corresponds to rocks), and a recurrence of my habitual use of "and/or" for comic effect in places where only one is needed. The mononym split is an oblique reference to a repeating gag on Top Gear, in which names would be split with "so-called" (e.g., "Top so-called Gear", or "Jeremy so-called Clarkson"). I've been snowcloning the gag for a couple of years now and it has gradually degraded into Baudrillard's third stage of sign-order, edging on fourth.

• "along with Judge MTG" - referencing Cyno rather tangentially; he's not technically a judge, as his official position is "General Mahamatra", which makes him more of a chief of campus police; however, his focus on "justice" and enforcing the law (constantly referencing it in dialogue) puts him firmly in "judge" mindspace for me³. "MTG" here stands for "Magic: The Gathering", and references Cyno's obsession with Genius Invokation TCG (an in-universe trading card game a la Gwent.) The fact that Cyno is referenced as "along with" (i.e., of secondary importance compared to the two ladies) is an inside joke; my current team uses Cyno as a primary DPS character, which makes him one of the most important characters when it comes to actual gameplay.
  • This one made me sit up and take notice of how oblique I was getting, but it hasn't actually stopped me. It was actually obscure enough for a Genshin ball-knower to not get it after multiple tries

• "the Bookworm Twink" - this one is fairly straightforward for Genshin players; it references Xingqiu, who is a skinny young fellow (i.e., "twink" in the colloquial sense of the word) who reads a lot (and is an author).

Revy for the proles
Roberta for the guys into femdom but lowkey about it
Balalaika for the guys into femdom and open about it
Sawyer for patricians

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 27, 2025

Revy for the proles

Roberta for the guys into femdom but lowkey about it

Balalaika for the guys into femdom and open about it

Sawyer for patricians

A waifu ranking with respect to Black Lagoon.

• Revy for the proles - Revy is a main character, a tatted up tomboy who dual-wields pistols and drinks, smokes, and swears heavily. She is by far and away the most popular waifu in the show, and as such is mainstream and comedically dismissed.

• Roberta for the guys into femdom but lowkey about it - Roberta is probably the second-most popular waifu, and is an Colombian ex-Marxist-Leninist revolutionary turned maid, who serves as an antagonist after the main characters kidnap the child of the family she serves. While her status as a maid makes her nominally servile, she can fistfight grown men, break kukris with her teeth, and dodge bullets; as such, she serves as a beard for guys who are into femdom but aren't willing to proclaim it to the world.

• Balalaika for the guys into femdom and open about it - Balalaika is a side character who is the regional head of the Russian Mafia (AKA "Hotel Moscow".) She is an ex-Soviet paratrooper who served as a sniper in Afghanistan, who is heavily scarred after torture by the Mujahideen⁴. She also has a giant ponytail, cracking tits, and walks around in pantyhose, high heels, and her old VDV coat⁵. A man openly into Balalaika is almost certainly going to be viewing her as a "dommy mommy" type figure, and as such one will not have her as a waifu unless one doesn't care about other people knowing they're into femdom. Now, I have ten Xitter posts about Balalaika⁶, use her as a benchmark for testing LLM roleplay capabilities, am slightly shorter than her, and walk around wearing a German field jacket, so this is also a reference to myself and my open (on Xitter) femdom appreciation.

• Sawyer for patricians - Sawyer the Cleaner is another (more obscure) side character, who is a disabled⁷, severely mentally ill, emotionally unstable, self-harming executioner and corpse disposal specialist who dresses goth and uses a chainsaw to kill people. The combination of her relative obscurity and lack of redeeming⁸ traits make dubbing her the "patrician" choice both a funny joke and a side-eye to my own fascination with her (less so than Balalaika, but in a "I can fix her" way, rather than a "step on me Mommy" way; I have a draft of a reverse/inverse Hallmark movie with a focus on business operations sitting around in my notes and head⁹)
  • A followup xeet after Norvid is confuzzled by the original one skips most of this and implies that her gothy aesthetic, electrolarynx usage, and chainsaw is enough to fully explain the patricianness of Sawyer (with the other characters having already been discussed here and there in my xeet corpus). It works, but is a lot less in-depth and misses the other aspects that make the xeet "fuller".

Longitudinal study via hellthreads

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 26, 2025

Longitudinal study via hellthreads

This one is rather unfair, as it was Norvid who introduced me to the "hellthread" jargon, but its base is reliant on my Xitter experience, so I'll go ahead and explain it anyway. In this case, Norvid floated the idea of "digital anthropology study of twitter code switching", covering how formality on Xitter changes based on the group of people interacting. I run with the bit by suggesting longitudinal studies, watching how code switching occurs in hellthreads (extremely long threads (in both word count and time taken to reach the end) involving a large group of people) based on my own habit of code switching based on context, boredom, subject-matter expertise, and various other factors.

Somebody get this message to all the guys in AA and the addicts living rough in the Tenderloin
Ain't no thang, nawmsayn? pic.twitter.com/Gdp2wNkuPs

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 7, 2025

Somebody get this message to all the guys in AA and the addicts living rough in the Tenderloin

Ain't no thang, nawmsayn?

This was in response to a Croissanthology post claiming that being wise is easy, with the specific example being "You could escape your alcoholism arc NOW."

• Somebody get this message to all the guys in AA and the addicts living rough in the Tenderloin - sarcasm, suggesting that this is a piece of advice that could instantly transform the lives of alcoholics and junkies the world over; the impact here hinges on knowing about how attempts at immediate escape from addiction (e.g., going cold turkey) are almost certain to fail.
  • There is a second part here with the Tenderloin reference; Croissanthology was in San Francisco at the time of posting, and thus there is an implied suggestion that he should go to the Tenderloin (an area notorious for addict presence, violence, and general disorder) and tell all the junkies how easy it is to quit and get their lives back in order.
• Ain't no thang, nawmsayn? - reinforcing the above, using urban slang in eye dialect to to sarcastically suggest that these major life improvements would be easy for Croissanthology to proselytize and for addicts to do.

Droppin this for later pic.twitter.com/vn6T7Vhieb

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 3, 2025

This is a nice compressed bit of Oklahoma culture: News9, a local OKC TV station (CBS affiliate) presenting their meteorologist discussing an ongoing storm with storm chasers on the ground, whose livestreams are being shown behind him (watching the storm chasers on the local news (News9, KOCO Channel 5, or KFOR) during a storm to figure out if you need to huddle in a closet or tornado shelter yet is a rite of passage for anyone who lives in Oklahoma for a prolonged period of time, and which station's weatherman is best is a topic of hot debate; the current leader is KOCO's Damon Lane, though mine was a KFOR family, who eventually moved to the neutral ground of Aaron Tuttle); in this case, one of the chasers is in the drive-thru of a Braums, a local fast food/ice cream/minimart chain considered one of the symbols of Oklahoma. As such, this can be considered an expression of Okietude in the same way that driving a decked-out F-150 while eating a cheeseburger with one hand, drinking a Budweiser with the other, and listening to country music the whole time can be considered an expression of Americanness.

I also have a special relationship with Braums, as I spent two years going to the Braums in Fayetteville after church to grab a bag of burgers and a medium shake, which would serve as both my lunch and dinner for the day.

[Xitter will not allow me to create an HTML embed for it]

That's not gone well

A self-deprecating reply to a bait post, highlighting that, on the list of standards presented by a random e-thot, I only fulfill one ("hair"¹⁰). The text references the Top Gear catchphrase, and the fact that I did not highlight the "sex once a week" standard questions both myself and the post (for it could be read as demanding that a prospective boyfriend already has sex once a week, which sounds absurd, or as demanding that she and the prospective boyfriend have sex with each other once a week, which creates an implied joke at the expense of my libido.)

Pulling up with a rack of PBR and a Bluetooth speaker to blast NBA youngboy and piss off all the ghosts so they leave
Reimu ain't got shit

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 21, 2025

Pulling up with a rack of PBR and a Bluetooth speaker to blast NBA youngboy and piss off all the ghosts so they leave

Reimu ain't got shit

A response to a post discussing the various haunted sites of Japan.

• Pulling up with a rack of PBR and a Bluetooth speaker to blast NBA youngboy and piss off all the ghosts so they leave - using the "obnoxious drunken tourist" stereotype as a method of establishing dominence over the ghosts; the PBR is both a cheap beer known for its usage at parties by drunk college students, and one of my favorite national domestics, and the booze in the system has a practical effect of incrasing confidence/decreasing inhibitions, helping one to swagger about rather than shivering in fear. Meanwhile, the Bluetooth speaker is a reference to Japan's ongoing problems with foreign tourists and Twitch streamers using speakers to blast their music and sound effects on public transport, in malls, and around other places where they aren't welcome; the use of NBA YoungBoy (I had FREEDDAWG in mind specifically here) enforces the macho hoodlum image, and it would follow that the Japanese ghosts would be annoyed by all the drunk and rowdy behavior and leave rather that attempt to haunt any such group.
• Reimu ain't got shit - a reference to Reimu Hakurei from Touhou, a shrine maiden who kills youkai; states that her magical anti-spirit powers are nothing compared to simply being obnoxious.

pic.twitter.com/dRaTOeHuhT

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 2, 2025

A GIF of the music video for Basshunter's DotA, posted in response to a xeet discussing how modders broke off parts of RTSes they enjoyed while ignored things they disliked; this was the process by which Defense of the Ancients ("DotA") was created, originally beginning as a mod for the RTS Warcraft III before being acquired by Valve and being turned into a standalone game in DotA 2. The song, as one can probably guess by now, discusses DotA and the playing of it.

Tyty. I've mixed d'nealian and kurrentschrift in an attempt to be worse than the average supreme court justice (zooniverse gang up!)

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 23, 2025

Tyty. I've mixed d'nealian and kurrentschrift in an attempt to be worse than the average supreme court justice (zooniverse gang up!)

We now take a quick break from Norvid's confusion to instead field some from Algon, who responded to a post I made discussing a writing workflow (where I sketch outlines on paper before typing them on the computer), where I posted my handwriting; he¹¹ complimented my penmanship, referring to it as "[i]llegible, but beautiful", and I responded to discuss the why and how of my handwriting.

• I've mixed d'nealian and kurrentschrift - I learned Kurrentschrift, an archaic German hand, freshman year of college as a lark. After using it for a semester or so, I found that it was difficult to read and not much easier to write than my existing D'Nealian cursive; however, after such an extended period using it (and the atrophy of my cursive skills due to a combination of typing and writing in print, which was already hard for others to read), a number of habits stuck (such as, but not limited to, long Ss, sharp Ms and Ns, and a flutter above the lowercase U.) I had previously retired the hybrid script after a few months of usage to compare it to printing, but, with a move to the workforce, in which no one is reading your handwriting anyway, I chose to bring it back as a pseudo-cipher to keep my thoughts private in meetings while taking notes
• worse than the average supreme court justice (zooniverse gang up!) - refers to a task on Zooniverse, a sort of folding@home for "human-shaped" projects. This site should be familiar to anyone who had to earn volunteering hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a notable project on it to transcribe handwritten conference notes left by Supreme Court justices, which are largely fucking unreadable.

Hashi sori yo... pic.twitter.com/2FUEhZGOgY

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 28, 2025

Hashi sori yo…

The launch post for my 2025 Christmas Xitter avatar, a version of the glitchy Izaya-with-aviators-and-flat-cap image that serves as my primary avatar modeled after Fate: Grand Order's chibi Nero Claudius from the (in)famous "padoru padoru" video. "Hashire sori yo" is beginning of the Japanese version of Jingle Bells that Nero sings.

Splitting and lumping ebbs and flows with trends in game design
Originally games were heavily split, then they got lumpier with sandboxes, then they started to split again with indies, then they lumped with the rise of the jiminy cockthroat, then split with live service

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 1, 2025

Splitting and lumping ebbs and flows with trends in game design

Originally games were heavily split, then they got lumpier with sandboxes, then they started to split again with indies, then they lumped with the rise of the jiminy cockthroat, then split with live service

Another in the splitting/lumping videogame discussion, where confusion arose over my use of the term "Jiminy Cockthroat." "Jiminy Cockthroat" is a term coined by Yahtzee Croshaw in his Ghost of Tsushima review and refers to open-world stealth-action games with crafting and collectibles, like Ghost of Tsushima. Like Top Gear, a number of seemingly-bewildering phrases I use are either references to or snowclones of Zero Punctuation gags.

Bro loves Jocko ig

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 14, 2025

Bro loves Jocko ig

Another direct response to a quoted Xeet, implying that Jocko Willink is high openness, low neuroticism, low agreeableness, high conscientiousness. Jocko, an ex-Navy SEAL and current podcaster/motivational speaker/flavor of influencer is known to be low neuroticism and high conscientiousness (being a SEAL is a testament to that), and his brusque personality and running of a podcast arguably implies low agreeableness and high openness respectively.

Monster made more off of an Astolfo cosplayer holding one up to his dick than Red Bull did from a year of motocross stunts

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) November 7, 2025

Monster made more off of an Astolfo cosplayer holding one up to his dick than Red Bull did from a year of motocross stunts

Refers to an incident where an Astolfo (a Fate: Grand Order rendition of the paladin, reimagined as a short and skinny, pink-haired, effeminate guy who tends to be mistaken for a women by newcomers to the series) cosplayer posted a series of photos holding a Monster can up to his penis, contrasting the femininity of his cosplay with having a large hog. In this case, I joke that the increase in Monster sales caused by the photos and the memeing around it at the time boosted Monster's profits more than a year's worth of sponsored stunts.

Esp true for HEMA (a wall you can bang your head against forever)
Lichtenauer's Zettel as a combination of mnemonic and cryptography draws both respect and ire from me

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) August 21, 2025

Esp true for HEMA (a wall you can bang your head against forever)

Lichtenauer's Zettel as a combination of mnemonic and cryptography draws both respect and ire from me

In which I express my frustration at the obscurantism¹² of European martial tradition, where the meaning behind fencing manuals was kept mainly for living masters, and which was lost when said masters died and no one continued their schools. The specific case is Lichtenauer's Zettel, a mnemonic poem used to train his school's fencing students, whose verse doesn't actually serve to explain the techniques in any detail, thus only becoming useful once you already know what you're doing. Now, this is a clever trick, and I have a soft spot in my heart for using poetry as a memory aid, but as someone who has done HEMA¹³, the lack of detail is frustrating, because performing necromancy on a fighting system is difficult work when there is no continuity in the school. Admittedly, there are a number of treatises that break down each section to explain the intended meaning, but I'd still have preferred the words from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Ain't no thang jit, kiterature review number one is getting cooked up this weekend
Submit questions now for possible answers

— kit 🇱🇮 (@theogcb405) December 11, 2025

Ain't no thang jit, kiterature review number one is getting cooked up this weekend

Submit questions now for possible answers

Our final stop, and a self-referential one at that. Now, the message here was clear, but Norvid wanted to know where I learned to talk "like that" (e.g., "Ain't no thang, jit"). Short answer? Public school. Long answer? A mix of television, online gaming, and exposure to normie social media, along with going to public school. Now, this is Zoomerspeak (Croissanthology's unfamiliarity with it can probably be traced to his time in France and general distance from normiedom), but of a particular type, where I rapidly code switch between formal, casual, Southern, international, black, and white registers while also mixing in my 6 degrees of Bacon references¹⁴. A lot of unfamiliar vocabulary comes from black slang, pulled through Instagram (especially from the "hood <anime>" accounts) and rap music, while my use of eye dialect to express my accent in writing makes normal phrases look weird ("nawmsayn?" rather than "you know what I'm saying?".) Some oddities come from my aformentioned Top Gear and Yahtzee Croshaw snowcloning telephone game, along with other, more obscure references (like BBC radio sitcoms of the late aughts/early '10s.)

It's now two in the morning, and this has been Kiterature Review. I might do this again if Norvid keeps getting confused, or if readers start submitting questions about my bullshit. We'll see. Good night!