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may 2023

hi! some highs and lows this month! feels like it lasted forever! might be developing a rsi! need to get really invested and obsessed in my art and work with a laser focus on something that only means anything to me personally! but i have a boring job i don't put any effort into! dear god i need to feel every emotion in the world at once!!

^ um. anyway. i died a thousand times in the first half of the month. the second half was better and there were only a few hundred deaths or so.

new on the site: updates to my art gallery, now better separated by theme so i have more room to talk about stuff if i want to. as the site naturally grows, i fear its structure is becoming rather convoluted. sure, it's still on a human-manageable scale, but a single human over time becomes equivalent to several. if you know what i mean. like a fucked up house. like the winchester house or something. but then again, this is a little beast of 50mb. which sometimes feels like a lot, sometimes like not much. i can quickly check for dead links and fix them when i make a big change (thank you deadlinkchecker.com), but big changes themselves are a little intimidating. anyway! i'll probably also add a section for commissions eventually when i'm feeling less lazy.

also five new lesbian vampire movie reviews. i uh. watched more vampire movies than i realized this month.

art

you might notice a theme with the art i did this month lmao. i've been on a certain state of mind. i have actually drawn a few things that are easier to show polite company but they're a set of badges for a dominance event over at flight rising, so i'll only post them next month, after they've gone live.

yipee! post-post-apocalyptic t4t indulgence! i'm particularly proud of my color picking for the blowjob in the left. i don't think color picking is my strong suit, and landing these values / saturation first try was kinda surprising. goes to show the strength of a basic grayscale foundation i suppose. anyway, more of a sketch than anything else, to get the idea and vibes down. this might get included into dataplankton once i figure out a way, because yknow. transhuman post-apocalyptic joy and all needs some sucking and fucking.

suggestive

suggestive

referenced from Limax maximus snails mating. of course

chill sketch. i really need to make a reference sheet for these two because i was winging so many things. worth it so i can see them outside my brain however :3

media

games

• he fucked the girl out of me (2022)
• myhouse.wad (2023): yeah i played for a bit the week it came out but it made me super super nauseous and i only later found out you can turn off camera bob in gzdoom (i hadn't even realized that it was there and making me queasy, i thought it was just the fast pace). anyway! love love this little guy it pulls off some great tricks and is consistently very good. here's a post with spoiler-free tips. the doom wiki page spoils the whole thing but hey sometimes you need specific guidance. anyway, the map really lives up to the hype

movies and series

• renfield (2023): so so fun! i was hooked on it from the trailer, and it delivered exactly that! it's more of a horror themed campy action movie than straight up horror, but it works very well and nic cage is extremely good and slaying so much penis it's unreal. waiting the extra two weeks to watch it in the cinema was a good call on my part, because it's a summer blockbuster kinda movie. with more gore than usual
• demon slayer (2019-): why is everyone a bishonen in this arc. prettyboy land. anyway, i really liked the first season when it came out but i kinda lost interest a little bit since then. it's still good though, and i like the art style
• mobile suit gundam: the witch from mercury (2022-): season 2 is here much sooner than i expected. it's been great :3
• the hunger (1983): sexy little movie with a sharp artistic direction. full review here
• carmilla (2019): a pretty decent if forgettable gothic romance, which isn't a bad thing to be. idem
• yojimbo (1961): my friend and i's samurai movie journey continues. it's fun! for now my only reference is harakiri and wow it's very different in pace and atmosphere. they're both quite good in different ways
• lèvres de sang (1975): thoroughly mid (if i'm being generous), and features no lesbian vampires whatsoever. boo. hiss. nevertheless, ibidem, because it was on the wikipedia article. and like. there's already a bunch of jean rollin vampire movies over there anyway
• crash (1996): can you believe that i once intended to double-feature this with titane? the two movies are in entirely different leagues. crash ran so titane could kinda crawl a little bit. very good movie. great if you like seeing characters conflate violence and intimacy
• re: cutie honey (2004): it's so fun. the style and animation are great and energetic, it all comes together really well. it really nails the tone to keep the sexualization playful, and honey is just a great character. also black claw's design makes me crazy she has so much swag. even if you don't watch it, take a look at the opening, it's fun
• les cinq diables (2022): a... competent movie, at first glance. but it doesn't articulate its elements very well. i don't think it's a flaw of the premise itself necessarily, just a disinterest on actually biting its teeth onto anything really. there's also a carelessness to the writing and portrayal of the black characters and racism; in a different movie i'd say they feel like an afterthought, but in here everything feels rather tacked on (some things are of course more noticeably tacked on than others). i watched this with a friend and we could not figure out what it was trying to say, or what the ending is supposed to mean at all. she also said it felt very cannes and i have to take her word for it. my 2020s french watches have in fact been very mid though (the 70s-80s vampire movies fill a different ecological niche).
• nadja (1994): a pretty and textural art film. ibid.
• the slumber party massacre (1982): i've actually watched the second movie first, and they're quite different in tone actually! it's not even the same slasher (they both use drills though, which slaps). so while II is more of a horror comedy that takes forever to build up to the actual slashing, here we are in more classical slasher territory, and it's an alright one. i do wonder about the original parody script though
• a nightmare on elm street 2 (1985): yeah it's pretty good but idk, elm street isn't really my thing
• ghostwatch (1992): yeah! the structure is so fun. it's pretty mild as far as horror goes but it's good and well made and plays really fun tricks. fun is the keyword here, it's really a halloween kind of movie! very nice!
• kill bill: volume 1 (2003): this is another of those movies i kept putting off watching in high school and then promptly forgot about. anyway, much as i hate tarantino this movie looks pretty good. didn't care much about it but i'll watch volume 2
• dracula a.d. 1972 (1972): first off, i'm obsessed with jess' haircut. some very fun costumes too, and a nice score. it's overall a fun lil movie and of course christopher lee and peter cushing are great. and there's a shower kill scene! making it only the second movie i've ever watched with a vampire killable by running water (the other was daughters of darkness, from 1971)
• run lola run (1998): cool movie, very stylish. she does run a lot.
• behind convent walls (1978): fighting for my life to tell all these nuns apart but all in all a fairly good movie. i can't tell when it's meant to be set in, but the costumes are better than benedetta (the bar is underground) so it's fine. we need to sexualize historical undergarments though. give those women slips.
• alucarda (1977): speaking of costumes, these are so 1970s does 1870s it's unreal. they're wearing gunne sax. also for some reason the subtitles were super inaccurate; it's an english language mexican movie but perhaps they were translating a spanish dub (or sub) back into english or something? anyway i found the movie rather dull and uninteresting, and it hinges on anti-roma racism. yikes. also while it has been compared to vampire movies i didn't find it fitting enough to go in The Page.
• blood and roses (1960): rewatch. i don't think it's a bad movie but it feels lacking. perhaps because it's not the original cut. ibid.

also, of course, succession is over and holy shit that was really good.

books and manga

• understanding comics (scott mccloud): quick read, pretty good
• this is how you lose the time war (max gladstone & amal el-mohtar): once again reread one of the only books ever~
• the imaginary museum (ben eastham): it's rather basic and introductory, but it's pretty good and straighforward so. worth it
• beautiful fighting girl (tamaki saitō): really interesting and approachable book, despite being at times outdated and some stuff i disagree with. in particular, i found the times where he went all out on the psychoanalysis (rather than media analysis) supremely lame. can't blame the book for being written by a psychiatrist 20 years ago
• saint peter's snow (leo perutz): a 1933 isekai. the writing is nice, i think the author manages the dream-like atmosphere very well in several scenes, i've no complaints there. but i feel trying to pull a "everyone says it was a dream but was it really?" in a story with no supernatural or supernatural-adjacent elements just doesn't work. i really was expecting something along the lines of ambiguously science-supernatural or cosmic horror, but it's all mundane, which makes it easy to say "yeah man you were in a coma". so that's a pity
• DNF beautifully grotesque fish of the american west (mark spitzer): it's just some dude telling you his fishing stories, and i didn't like in search of monster fish very much so i decided to drop it after two chapters. i might come back to it but i have a long to-read list
• naming the bones (laura mauro): ehh it's decent. there are some pretty good and scary scenes, but it fails to really build up the tension. also the protagonist is so unlikeable, which isn't a sin or anything, but there's some judgemental narration that feels very out of place and grating
• claymore (norihiro yagi): hey real quick why did i only hear about this now? dark fantasy warrior women created to fight for a fucked up organization, wielding huge swords?? i really like the art style and there are very good designs, and the story is cool as well, it escalates a lot. definitely recommend this one. also: there's no romance! so while that means no lesbians ( :( ) it does mean no weird shoehorned heterosexuality so that was a massive relief
• stories of your life and others (ted chiang): godddd he's so good. favorites were (unsurprisingly) tower of babylon (i like it when there's a big tower) and story of your life (killer story and very well written. arrival is a good movie but it doesn't hold a candle to the source material). honorable mention for hell is the absence of god for its spectacular setting. i also loved the structure of liking what you see: a documentary and division by zero. overall it's a top tier collection of shorts, excited to read exhalation

as i post this, i'm currently reading the enterprise of death by jesse bullington, and enjoying it quite a bit :)

i'm also at half my reading goal for this year, which is 40 books — lower than last year because i had really slow months. we're so back though.

cya! hope something lgbt happens to you next month! and to me as well of course :3

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