woah it's been a year now since i started blogging monthly. cool.
anyway, early this month i presented my bachelor thesis finally, and it went super well ^v^ really happy it's all over, and now here's a breather until i go for a masters 😳
new on the site: i've updated marrow #5 with further thoughts on stable diffusion, based off the paper diffusion art or digital forgery?. i'd like to add that stable diffusion is getting all the scrutiny because it's the model that can be scrutinized — dall-e 2 and other proprietary, closed source models cannot, but they should be.
check out:the happy ending of PT: a video essay. god i love PT, and in a way i'm glad it only exists as borderline lost media (though obviously i wish to see it preserved!!), and as the teaser of a never realized silent hill game. highly recommend the video.
digital art
heads up: the below image is nsfw. but the only straightforward way i could manage it was blurring with css, so uh there are niche situations where it'll be unblurred most likely. idk i just didn't want to put it behind a clickthrough, nor use javascript (which would break it for people who don't use it anyway). anyway! hover to unblur!
feels good to work on something small and simple for once. i'd have gone further with actually painting but my wrist hurt and strictly speaking this was procrastination. very helpful that i was not in my primary program so figuring out just how to render it as i'd liked would have taken brainpower.
i used mypaint for this bad boy, which i found to be pretty good at exactly one thing out of the box: mimicking fairly thin graphite. and literally nothing else. the brush engine seems to be quite robust, so it could probably be a solid primary art program for linux actually (it feels like what i imagine procreate does), except as you know i have a fatal allergy to going through menus to change my brush settings. that's my oekaki / paint tool sai swag.
butch4butch agilulf and bradamante, of the nonexistent knight fame. i've sketched this specific pose several times (i'm being haunted by it), and the different iterations have different nuances i'd also like to further develop. my newly acquired ocs also need some development (specifically i want to design their armors properly).
algilulf as the archetype of a knight in shining armor is freed from historical accuracy (and consistency), in her nonexistence being flexible to become what the story demands. but as a suit of armor she can only be violent / exist in a violent context, in a way. she might be chivalric but she's also kinda mostrous in that way. agilulf is the idea of being hardened by adversity, but she has been congealed into hopelessness by it. calvino treats the character (and his demise) as comical, but there's some tragedy to it too.
bradamante's desire for agilulf is about both romance and identity — she wants to be with her (the only knight she hasn't fucked) as well as be her (the paragon of knighthood, chivalry and butchness). in a way they're kinda the same character, agilulf being the metaphor and bradamante the person. and i'm not too good about telling stories about people. not that i was planning on it anyway. whatever i do with these new ocs (donut steel) will be mostly visual.
ceramics
ok so turns out! i ended up making twelve pieces for this project (plus four unrealted slipware). don't feel like posting all of them but here's a few (open in new tab for fullsize, i thought they looked more stylish at this smaller res):
had a great time editing these pics. i took them with flash on, then tweaked curves to get rid of pure black and make midtones darker, and then slapped a lil pixelation filter. it nails a very specific vibe to me, that i can't quite describe.
this was a pretty fun project to work on (and by that i mean making the pieces themselves, everything else related to this class was garbage — at least i got a 10/10 though! which was kinda unexpected because my report was very lame). cool to revisit the transformed paleolithic venus concept from my dollmaker!
the slipware pieces aren't strictly speaking part of the project but they come from the exact same place, transgenderism as primordial, joyful androgynes etc. you get it (← i always write to a trans audience first). anyway i posted more photos of these over on tumblr (and cohost), i really love them. they're tiny so not very useful (the cup can be the trans joy shot cup for transgenderizing yourself instantly) but they're nice to just hold and look at :)
media
games
eternal tides (2022): new game jam game from my friend ^_^ it's a nice little roguelike! the combat is simple but it feels nice to strategize dealing with those damn snakes
silent hill: orphan (2007): a point and click silent hill mobile game converted into a doom wad? ok. you now have all the info you need to know what i thought of it tbh.
[WIP] the legend of zelda (1986): i've never been much of a zelda person (although i've played several of the handheld games, and completed minish cap twice), and that felt kinda weird somehow, especially after becoming completely entranced by tunic. well, i'd never actually played the original, and i think i Get the hype now. see, as i've mentioned before my main issue with tloz is that they're Games That Don't Shut Up, often with some really contrived railroading early on. and i thought that's just how the franchise is. but the first game's just so! pleasantly quiet! i think i've posted somewhere that oracle of ages / seasons was a souls-like, and i was being silly, but yeah that souls-y dna is here too! i love the way arrows use rupees, and how you can buy keys, and how shops sell more or less the same handful of items at different prices. i love knowledge of a game's mechanics as something that aids you.
a link between worlds (2013): simultaneously-ish. it's one of the few games i physically own on the 3ds, i don't even remember getting it, i never went past two lorule dungeons. well now i'm armed with a hacked 3ds so i can use cheats. i don't like this game very much. it's cool that it's nonlinear, but it doesn't have ANY sense of progression, and the tools don't synergize at all with one another. i think you should at least be able to solve dungeons with multiple item combinations so that they each seem more valuable, because they feel very single-use. even with the bombs, there are bomb enemies in nearly every situation you need them in a dungeon. of course it stems from the rental mechanic, but that mechanic is stupid anyway so. what you end up with is a damn mandatory stealth sequence where you can't even kill the guards. at least you could kill them in hourglass.
movies and series
kimera (1996): a beautifully mediocre yaoi ova with an androgynous vampire. it could probably have been good if it had more runtime, which seems to also be the critical / fanbase (?) consensus, so i really really wanted to read the manga. except it's effectively lost media to me. i have found the first twenty pages of it (i've archived this link jic). the group working on it never scanlated more than that because the manga is / was licensed :( so yeah. now i have this open sidequest on my quest log forever as it were
pinocchio (del toro, 2022): god del toro never fails. impeccable designs all around, i love the animation, and the story is great too. loved it
glass onion: a knives out mystery (2022): that's jared leto's hard kombucha is simply 2022's most iconic line. i fucking love the first movie, i fucking love murder mysteries, benoit blanc is impeccable etc etc this movie is really fucking good
pontypool (2008): oh i love single location horror. this one is creepy. i really enjoyed it, but the third act is rather weak — although i don't know what i'd have done differently
repo! the genetic opera (2008): this movie looks so much like pathologic, i love it. it's the blurry sepias with heavy bloom paired with the impeccable goth costuming. as a musical it's just not that good though
the lesbian vampire movie round-up will have to wait; the skeleton's already set up, but i haven't had the time / brainpower to watch many more movies, much less write neat-ish blurbs and reviews for the movies i've already watched. so i'll make it part of my january housekeeping, along with finally posting my damn bachelor's thesis.
books and manga
zanzalá (afonso schmidt): the book this is in calls it an utopia, which i find fascinating because. i'm not a white guy in 1936. well, this anthology is from 2011 so it's just the "not a white guy" part i guess. it's a weird sort of low tech jetsons utopia, very american dream. wikipedia says he was an anarchist but he can't look past his own normativity to create an imaginative world or say something about the odd "utopia" he created, so it's not properly anti-capitalist either imo (although i guess this kind of leftist in-fighting instinct that makes me want to argue with a long dead guy proves his anarchism). and it's also racist. he often borders on commentary / satire, it feels like he could have written Something but he falls short. didn't like the writing either, his exposition is always clumsy. bad way to start an antholgy imo but i guess it's a formative text for brazilian scifi (boo)
a escuridão (andré carneiro): meaning "the darkness"; we have blindness at home (← has not read it but watched the movie for school and hated it). i'm jesting, because the premise is actually different from saramago's (and, in fact, predates it by 32 years), and it's pretty interesting. light and heat gradually start disappearing, until the entire world is shrouded in darkness and people can't cook (this is the single largest downside here because temperatures never play a role in the story). is it scifi? *shrugs*. is it deserving of being one of the four "The Best Brazilian Science Fiction Novellas", as this anthology boldly claims? nah. it's alright i guess, no more than that
afterlives of the saints (colin dickey): it's alright. if i'd read the essays separately, linked from tumblr or something, i'd have found most of them pretty interesting, but i tend to expect something chunkier from books. which is always a mistake with these pop-history kinda stuff.
o 31º peregrino (rubens teixeira scavone): "the thirty-first pilgrim", this novella's setting is the canterbury tales. the writing style is simply unbearable, probably because middle english doesn't really translate too well into brazilian portuguese. once again, it's an interesting concept, a possible alien visitation in the 14th century, but it constantly feels like the story is about to begin and then it never does, and it ends very abruptly. i think leaving the aliens mostly unseen can be done well but this story never has any stakes, no sense of threat or dread or anything. this woman shows up, says she was visited by a bunch of weird apparitions at night, became pregnant and was sent on peregrination by her vicar. the other pilgrims argue because they think she's the devil. she vanishes at night, some guys see weird lights, they find her corpse with the eyeballs gone and her abdomen destroyed. the end. like come on. put some meat and catholic imagery on those bones! angels and aliens as analogous! well, if you want scifi canterbury tales read hyperion. there's even a little weird catholic scifi horror (that is later squashed like a bug in the absolutely terrible fall of hyperion)
vermis (plastiboo): yesyeysyeysyyeysyeyyes !! don't ask me about overseas shipping and euro to real conversion rates, but it was worth every cent. i love their art so much, and this book is just dripping in style, the art direction is super tight. it's also, of course, one of my favorite forms of storytelling, being the official guide to a nonexistent videogame, with that delicious medieval horror vibe, like dark souls distilled to a little tome you can touch and smell. it'll get a reprint in january, and i highly recommend getting it if you can ^_^
the nonexistent knight (italo calvino): reread — i actually had to read it in middle school (invisible cities too, but i don't think it was on the same year), not that it makes much of a difference with my shit memory. i'd been meaning to revisit it for a while. anyway, it's pretty good but i thought bradamante was a bigger deal but i clearly underestimated calvino's misogyny*. SAD. what if i took her and agiluf and made them butch4butch. what then
lancelot and the lord of the distant isles (patricia terry and samuel n. rosenberg): auuauauu i fucking love tragedy man. this one fucked me up. going insane over arthuariana. really good.
the castle of otranto (horace walpole): from 1764 this is regarded as the first gothic novel, and it's ok. more approachable than i was expecting.
we have always lived in the castle (shirley jackson): ough merricat is just such a painfully well written character. jackson does it again huh. incredible book
favorites
mandatory december wrap up right? i actually did a lil mini fav book segment in july but here's a chunkier list. not including stuff i've revisited (tbf it'd only be annihilation iirc). in no particular order, books manga movies series i really liked all lumped together, no reviews no blurbs no comments no notes:
the haunting of hill house (shirley jackson)
we have always lived in the castle (shirley jackson)
stone butch blues (leslie feinberg)
carrie (stephen king)
braiding sweetgrass (robin wall kimmerer)
nope (2022)
tunic (2022) ← goty. absolutely no contest
innocent (shinichi sakamoto)
severance (2022)
bloodborne psx (2022)
mad god (2021)
berserk (kentaro miura)
#drcl midnight children (sinichi sakamoto)
vermis (plastiboo)
house of leaves (mark z. danielewski) ← zampano's essay only
the godfather (1972)
the velvet vampire (1971)
lancelot and the lord of the distant isles (patricia terry and samuel n. rosenberg)
