september 2022

hullo! how are you! i'm... hm, my thesis deadline is closing in and, while i know i can do it (i think), i've been procrastinating far too much. i'm just an animal, i ought to be eating fruit and chilling by the water somewhere. unaddressed brain worms etc.

an interesting read, maya.land's summary of turing complete user, by olia lialina. this book's been on my radar for a while but i haven't been able to read it yet, so it was nice to see it pop up on my neocities feed.

new on the site, i wrote a little about stable diffusion and GAN datasets. emphasis on little, it's just casual thing that could have well been a tumblr post, but hey, check it out! in particular if you're worried about "AI" as art theft because, spoilers, it's not quite that simple.

and on that subject, here's a good tumblr post about clipdrop, because there's some drama and misinformation about it that drives me insane.

i also wrote a combo rant and fashion advice column thing, marrow #6. i feel the advice part could probably be expanded but i also wanted to keep it simple to people who just want to get into fashion in general ^-^

works in progress

site stuff: for next month i'll try to post my vampire body horror thing i've been sitting on, whether i'm 100% happy with it or not. it is october afterall! (can't wait for amc's interview with the vampire!!)

i'm also working on this painting, and by working i mean i started it early this month and forgot about the file on my desktop forever. cropped + heavily compressed because i don't want to take up space with a silly wip like that. interestingly enough, i find that photos can endure a lot more quality loss without looking hideous, when compared to drawings. maybe it's not exactly that, but just... having a higher level of detail might make the losses not as prominent. idk! i really need to explore compression more in-depth, like make a comparative chart or something (← professional procrastinator behavior)

a sketch of three nude anthropomorphic figures sitting at a bar table

and lastly, the thesis! here's some screenshots. i've been having a great time just creating things that look fucked and buggy by messing with godot's settings. i love this program to bits! first off it's really lightweight and has great performance. then there's a single toggle for billboards which saves me a lot of trouble since i am most definitely not a programmer and brand new to gdscript. messing with rendering resolution is also super easy so this crusty pixel effect is just a matter of tweaking a couple of project settings. so yeah! should never have bothered with unity!

a plain hallway, low ceiling. images are exhibited on the walls, their details lost with the distance

three overlapping cubes, in the corner of a room. everything is the same texture of abstracted shapes

these also got jpeg'd to hell and back as you can see. images on the corridor / gallery are some of what i generated these last two years. i haven't 100% settled on the selection yet (there's some stuff i added after taking + compressing the screenshot), and i need to properly distribute them in the space too.

simple stable

so with stable diffusion came the simple stable notebook, so of course i had to mess with it a little bit! i also played around with removing pixel information by scaling down and up again and good old jpeg compression. indexing is fun and looks good, but you have to appreciate our friend the trust .jpg. if GANs want to get photorealistic, i wanna make those photos look like they were taken on an old cybershot! i'm tired of fidelity i want crunch! :-)

AI generated image of what looks like a large orange mollusk on the seaside, with an ornate gold frame

AI generated image. oil painting of two nude people, kissing against a forest background, with a gold frame

this image of the kiss was from my prompt experimentation i talked about on ~~mambo~~ marrow #5. the specific prompt was Two Young Androgynes Kissing, Leopold Boilly 1790-1794. i also generated some men and different time periods. this one was my favorite of the bunch.

ceramics

my prof is a bitch (and that's a word i don't tend to toss around when talking about people) but hey at least i got neat objects out of it! i wanted to make a gif of the cup but i don't have a nice backdrop / light setup that won't create weird shadows from my phone

an abstract mask, full of ridges, painted bright red

a round dish. a transgender angel with four wings is painted in red and black

a small triangular dish. a radiolarian skeleton is painted in red

top view of an oval bowl. an abstract trans person is painted on the bottom, shapes reminiscent of a radiolarian skeleton, with multiple genitals and breasts

inside of a cup. the transgender symbol is painted on the bottom

side view of a cup; loose line drawings of simplified and abstracted trans people connected by the arms

drink from the trans joy cup to instantly become transgender! joy included if you're drinking with friends ^-^

media

games

the black iris (2021): listen to me. look into my eyes. you WILL play this game. it's short and free. it's cosmic horror, and it makes extremely good use of the medium of video games for that. honestly you could say there's some intrinsic cosmic implications when you control a videogame character but that's neither here nor there. do yourself a favor if you like horror and lo-fi aesthetics. i want to eat this game. holy shit
we are here because of those that are not (2020): it's more of an interactive short film than a visual novel but it goes here. really interesting
quake (1996): yeahh! i've played a little of the og doom and ultrakill before but the hectic pace is just too much for me (i've tried setting ultrakill's game speed lower, but it doesn't feel right), but this guy feels slower and more comfortable. plus, since it's an entity in itself there are engines that run in linux! i'm using darkplaces (here's a good installation tutorial). i had limited internet the day i decided to install it, so i went looking for the lightest download... which means i grabbed my id1 folder from this random github project. and last but definitely not least (thank you trent reznor), the soundtrack. i love it when games have multiple installation steps like this, it's just kinda fun. quake and doom are just on a whole other level esoterically speaking or something

i also showed a lot of self-restraint by not playing morrowind. the fact that openmw runs on linux is constantly tempting me like satan in the desert but i really have a lot of work to do!

movies and series

brokeback mountain (2005): oughh.......
berserk (1997): on one hand there's a lot less sexual violence in the anime thank god, but i felt it kinda rushed through the golden age events and fell flat emotionally. especially griffith's prison, torture and rescue felt like blink-and-you-miss-it. there's none of that sense of foreboding either, it's sad :(

books and manga

what moves the dead (t. kingfisher): great story, bad writing. it's based off the fall of the house of usher but the narrator just won't shut up and stop going into tangents ever? ka'd be more appropriate on a slightly humorous / light-hearted murder mystery, not gothic horror. i found that it did get better after a while (maybe i got accostumed) but still it's one of those books where i have to scream "i could fix it!!!!!" in my brain. i could add horror sex into it for example
arsène lupin, gentleman-thief (maurice leblanc): yeah this is what i mean by light-hearted murder mystery (even though it's light on the murder). collection of short stories but it does read like a single book, which i think makes sense considering how they were published. it's really fun, good way to rest my brain before my next read which is...
house of leaves (mark z. danielewski): it's a good book overall, but i'll say i thought i'd have a greater appreciation for johnny's story after i finished it... tbh i like it even less. zampanò's writing is a rock solid haunted house story but the presence of johnny feels like the author wasn't confident enough? like "wow this guy's whole life got fucked isn't that scary?" and. i know that's not the point of his arc but considering hol as a horror novel it's just... lame. hol is a lot of different things at once so of course if you choose something to be What It Is the remaining parts will seem out of place. to me it took the aspect of carrie: a horror story coupled with academic research on that story — but while carrie was mostly the story itself with the occasional fragment of research / writing about it, hol is focused on the research of a telling of said story (while also telling it). so yeah if you're reading it through the lens of an inversion of carrie then of course johnny does fuckall for the book. he's also just annoying.
fullmetal alchemist (hiromu arakawa): i've watched the 2003 anime, but i never got around finishing brotherhood which is an absolute shame. this manga is good, holy shit
phallos (samuel r. delany): reading house of leaves the way it was meant to be read: alternating with a novella that's a web essay about a fictional gay erotic novel set in the ancient (ish? like second century) mediterranean. though that makes it sound too complicated. the tone is great, it's not as dry as hol, and it's definitely not something i was expecting to read? it's quite interesting
things have gotten worse since we last spoke (eric larocca): nasty little horror novella (positive). it's not particularly good but since it's a one sitting type of book it doesn't matter

cya!!

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