Earlier this month, I interviewed the lovely editor and mediator seaeffess. We discussed annotations, the forums, cat GIFS, and more. Check it out!! — butterscotch pie

butterscotch pie: let’s get started with a question regarding one of your favorite things in the world: cats! you’re quite the connoisseur of cat GIFs, and you frequently post them in threads. i’m curious: how do you find so many high-quality cat GIFs? what websites do you find them on? the world needs to know.

seaeffess: Well, I’m loathe to reveal my secrets...but I will since it’s you asking.

When I come across cat gifs which I love, I tend to bookmark them. However, when I have an uneared emotion I’d like to express, I tend to search for the gif I want (in giphy, if you must know) using words I think which will fish it out. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, in which case I either repeatedly revise my search or decide on something else.

I think people think I do this to be funny, and that’s true. But it’s also about adding levity to something. Not changing the subject, but changing the framing.

It’s also a bit of a challenge for myself. Before I came to genius, I was not a habitual gif user. I made it part of my M.O. upon arrival.

butterscotch pie: if a machine existed that could take three foods and fuse them together, which three foods would you choose to fuse together and why?

seaeffess: So, okay, here’s my pitch: french fries (really good ones, crispy and rich & salty), vanilla (or sweet cream) ice cream, and some nice black pepper. Maybe that’s cheatin', but you won’t be disappointed.

butterscotch pie: let’s get meta: how did you discover Genius, and what made you want to annotate?

seaeffess: I was introduced to Genius by my beau (eff_society) who is a transcriber. I had just finished my Master’s thesis and was hungry for something tangible to stick my teeth into.

butterscotch pie: according to a Wikipedia article with poor grammar and a lack of citations that i still foolishly believe is correct, an annual potato pancake festival occurs every year in Korosten, Ukraine. this festival includes multiple competitive events, including the following two: "Potato pancakes powerlifting", in which players squat with two heavy jugs full of potato pancake, and “Potato pancakes throwing”, in which potato pancakes are thrown in a bowl with sour cream from five meters away. if you were to attend this festival, which of these two events would you prefer to compete in and why?

seaeffess: I think the latter would be more fun. I don’t really like squats or lifting for the sake of lifting, but I love throwing things and I think the splash would be fun to see! I could also more easily sneak some latke white someone wasn’t looking :)

butterscotch pie: i’m assuming you have several Genius goals, but i’m wondering: what is the number one thing you’re hoping to accomplish on Genius?
seaeffess: I used to have a lot of clear Genius goals. But to be honest, other than making the forums a more healthy community, I think now I just want to make good tates. Unfortunately, those are conflicting goals.

butterscotch pie: some of your most-upvoted annotations are on songs by The Weeknd. are you a fan of his? if so, what do you enjoy about his music? if not, why do you choose to annotate his songs?

seaeffess: I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of him as a person; I am unusual, I think, in that I tend not to be a fan of an artist’s person, but only their work. There are exceptions, of course, especially in the case of prominent scientologist actors (whose work I will not support or watch unless I can be sure they are not monetarily benefiting from it), Beyonce (whose person I enjoyed more than her music before Lemonade), and Rihanna (who I think is the BAMF of all BAMFS). So I have no real interest in The Weeknd as a person, nor do I pretend to know much about him except that he’s from Canada.

I will say that I am a big fan of his recent stuff (I’m not familiar with his early stuff, which I am aware makes me a big waste of musical time) simply because it resonates with me. I am very interested in pop artists who have a pervasive undercurrent of haunting beneath the brightness of their work; The Weeknd is obviously melancholic this way, but Gaga does it, too; the best, most remarkable example of experiencing this is listening to Ke$ha’s Deconstructed EP after being familiar with her music. There’s a desperation, a sense of abjection underlying whatever sex or drugs or lifestyle they’re purportedly selling or being sold by, and that’s what I find truly interesting about Beauty Behind the Madness and Starboy. At the end of the day, The Weeknd’s lyrics are boring if you interpret them to be about getting high and getting laid. They start to make meaning when you notice that he is laying his whole gruesome heart on the table and allowing you to judge it and see how he judges it. That’s not something every artist does (or can do) and I’m attracted to it; it complicates the music, and it makes me think, and at the end of the day, that’s what I come to pop music for.

butterscotch pie: let’s say you’re a character in a Greek mythological tale, and you’ve done… something. your punishment is that you will be trapped in an empty void for all of eternity, and all you can do is listen to a playlist of three songs of your choosing. what three songs would you choose and why?

seaeffess: Ooo, this is difficult. I’m gonna pretend it’s one concerto and say Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, because it’s long and gorgeous and encompasses a range of emotions. Then probably the Flamenco version of "Hotel California" (from Hell Freezes Over), my first favorite song. Then, weirdly, either “Nicotine” or “Casual Affair” by Panic! at the Disco, because they remind me of perhaps the happiest part of my life, when I lived in Vancouver, BC. I used to listen to this specific playlist on my tiny, crappy mp3 player that even the sales clerk tried to convince me not to buy while teaching myself to figure skate at the free, public outdoor rink, and those two songs were on it. Because I lived at the bottom of the city limits, and the rink was downtown, the scenery on the bus ride would change radically from the national forest to the mountains, and I almost always caught the sunset over the ocean—I’m a fool for that kind of awe.

butterscotch pie: judging by your profile background image, i’m assuming you’re a fan of books. what is your favorite book of all time?

seaeffess: Good GOD that’s almost an impossible question. I think I’ll have to answer it several ways. My favorite book of poems are either Rilke’s Duino Elegies (trans. Stephen Mitchell), or Franz Wright’s “Unknown Rilke.” The former change my writing dramatically, and also renewed my sense of…appreciation for being. The latter contains some truly daring religious poetry which knocks my socks off; I’m always interested in awe in the face of the divine, in part because my own inability to have faith is tied so tightly to fact, but my experience of life is saturated with wonder.

The book I read when I’m sad is Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value (I try to avoid the anti-Semetic parts). My favorite novel is a tie between Altered Carbon (a sci-fi noir masterpiece)and Jane Eyre.

My favorite book as a kid was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; as a teenager, The Blue Sword.

butterscotch pie: in addition to being a Genius editor, you’re also a mediator. what general direction do you hope the forums go, and what would you like to see happen on the forums in the near future?

seaeffess: I want the forums to be a safe space for women, people of color, and those belonging to the LGBTQ community. That’s the direction I want them to move in.

butterscotch pie: now, you state in your username definition that ‘‘seaeffess’ is the spelling of your initials, but can you come up with a different phrase that “CFS” would also be the acronym for?
seaeffess: Constantly finding synonyms.

butterscotch pie: what subjects would you like popular music to explore?

seaeffess: When it comes to expressive media, I have a rule: show me something new, or show me something old done very, very well. So I don’t believe a song’s value is limited by the novelty of its subject matter; but it’s very hard to make an exceptional pop song without some kind of reinvention simply because what makes a pop song pop demands a certain straightforwardness. So, when pop songs stick around in my playlists, it’s usually because they do something else on the level of subject matter or atmosphere. One of the greatest tools overlooked by pop artists these days is cohesion between songs. This is what initially drew me to Tove Lo: her songs are not musically complex, and even her subject matter (heartache, mostly) isn’t truly new. But her music possess an internet magnetism which elevates her experience to some other, greater level: a sense of psyche, perhaps, or an experience of the mind of this particular woman in love. This is something I’d like to see more of, this feeling of gendered perception. Pop music is really good at expressing the bombast of love; but it’s rare that you find that bliss or break inflected with a sense of character or situation.

Something else I really appreciate is when an artist can create the feeling of a specific human interaction: not just falling in love, or breaking up, or whatever, but the circumstances surrounding the event and the personalities involved. Three songs which draw me in like this are “Ties,” by Years & Years, Hey Violet’s “Guys My Age,” and The Faint’s “Young & Realistic.” I don’t need a pop song to illustrate what it’s like to be stupidly infatuated; I’ve heard it before. What does intrigue me is when am given the details of a time and a person and I am left to make a story out of it, a story involving real people who are different from me, and who feel real.

butterscotch pie: you’re a big fan of chicken pot pie, so here’s a chicken pot pie related question: if you had to replace the crust with a Hostess snack cake, what Hostess snack cake would you choose?

seaeffess: This is hard, because I really love the crust and I really hate hostess. But I think, in the end, it has to be twinkies, because they are the most likely to work well with the delicious filling.

butterscotch pie: without looking any of them up, which of these three real music genres do you think you’d enjoy the most: “vegan straight edge”, “chiptune pirate metal”, and “solipsynthm”?

seaeffess: I think it’s probably pretty safe to say vegan straight edge. One of my best friends IRL used to be in a vegan straight edge band, I believe, and he’s one of the most intense, remarkable people on the planet. But he’s not a vegan and I think in that band he was mostly in charge of the screaming.

butterscotch pie: if you were a witch in the Harry Potter universe, what spell do you think you’d cast most often and why?

seaeffess: Oh, accio, without a doubt. I can’t find shit.

butterscotch pie: now we have sadly reached the end of this interview. here’s the final question: what’s your all-time favorite Genius annotation that you've made?

seaeffess: I’m not exactly sure why, but I think it may be this one. I’m proud of the Starboy ones, and the early ones I did on Saltillo. But this line by Mac Miller really let me write concisely about rhythm and rhyme while also talking about sexuality in a way which I found was tender instead of purely erotic. I’m always impressed when lyricists manage to be both sexual and treat the object of their desires like a person, rather than, well, an object. Mac Miller isn’t always good at that (and I have a lot to complain about him calling the album Divine Feminine) but in this case I felt a long look at the line was worth it; I spent several days walking and writing in my head on my commute until I felt I finally understood it, and I’m really proud it’s on Genius.