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june 2023

hi, hope yall had a lovely gay month :). no homo for me sadly but i stay silly! i stay silly! and i've been getting some writing done with tnk. i'm doing a fictional essay (← guy who only read house of leaves and jorge luis borges) and i'm still debating whether i wait until it's finished or if i should post chapters as i finish them. i better think up a slightly better title than the the nonexistent knight yuri but names have never been my strong suit. i lucked out having a decent androgynous childhood nickname or i'd have had a terrible time picking mine. i still think venus salvador is a cool alternative though, it sounds so much better with my surname that i might adopt it as an artistic name just to see. not that i've been applying to shows or anything, i fucking hate applying to shows. anyway.

new on the site: first of all, a new color scheme. lowered the light theme contrast and made the dark theme actually light-on-dark. i've no way of testing prefers-contrast that i can find (testing light/dark is easy with inspect element but contrast is troublesome) but the pure black/white should be functional. other minor changes here and there mostly to simplify stuff. i spent a few hours trying to rework the typography too because most fonts look really bulky when light-on-dark, or too thin when dark-on-light. i settled on trebuchet with helvetica as a fallback for now. maybe i should just let your defaults do the work — your default browser fonts are set to your preferences, right? i really appreciate beautiful typography but it's not my strong suit.

i've cleaned up (and ocr'd) my scan of casey reas' making pictures with generative adversarial networks. you can grab it from the site map. it took a while to tidy everything up but it was so worth it, it looks great. scan tailor is pretty easy to use and the automatic detection is pretty accurate overall so i definitely reccomend it! i even uploaded it to libgen 😳. she let me hit because i do monkcore activities on my spare time.

while we're housekeeping, i put up plenty more links at links.html; went through my youtube subscriptions and shared some highlights. i also posted marrow #9, why am i a bit obsessed with windows 9x?, which is essentially a shrine tbh.

ok, housekeeping over. time for a couple of shared links:

• perhaps not quite seasonally appropriate although it is late autumn / early winter here: unwindr, a short horror story told in reverse chronological order, through a maze review website.
• negative capabilities: investigating apophasis in ai text-to-image models is an academic article about loab and mysticism. it's pretty interesting.
• king gizz's latest album, petrodragonic apocalypse, fucks hard
• i've also been listening to evanescence's fallen but that's hardly novel. i didn't really listen to them much Back Then but uh. i've been on a certain state of mind

art

a set of badges for earth's boss hunt event over at flight rising ^_^

i've started playing pixel cat's end (usual username — solflo) so here are some chill low stakes not-cats i drew to get some fake digital cash in. i like how the dithering adds just a liiittle bit of texture but you can barely tell it's there since they're so small. the file size is also super super tiny teehee

media

like last year, i'm picking a couple favorites from each category. i've a tendency to kinda forget things i've liked lmao. this way i more or less avoid the recency bias of doing it all at the end of the year ^_^

games

• water womb world (2020): revisited because i was feeling very deep sea horror -y. i love yames' games. it looked cool as fuck against my siphonophore wallpaper.
• out of bounds (2023): really cool on multiple levels, starting from its format: a haptic essay. check it out
• incident at grove lake (2023): looks obscenely good but controls poorly (like moving through jelly, with an awful camera bob) — luckily there isn't much of it. while i love alien fiction, abduction just isn't really my thing, and i've yet to find abduction (and adjacent) horror that i found remotely scary. i can appreciate this game on an aesthetic level however
• rental (2022): cute and feels very nice to control ^_^
• online (with 0 others) (2022): really cool moodpiece, i love all the glitch effects! i'm a sucker for digital decay that feels as if the computer (or in this case, the game server) is alive and dying. it's like only through death we can tell it was alive in the first place etc.
• coward town (2016): real cool looking and sounding. it's just an aesthetic prototype that never got a full game though
• sin(e)s (2023): hmm tasty atmosphere of paranoia and it looks so good. it's part of C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D., which i haven't got around to playing yet
• truss (2022): a pretty cozy creepy game, it's nice.
• signalis (2022): just bought it yesterday so i haven't finished. enjoying it a lot so far but it's nerve-wracking. i'm not very good at survival horror / horror games where i can die, in general. because i'm bad at videogames.

this semester's favorites were definitely titanic ii (2022) and myhouse.wad (2023). fairly predictable i think.

movies and series

• sea fever (2019): i have a soft spot for the sea so i went into it with a certain fear of an anaconda situation where there's just a massive aggressive squid. thankfully it's isolation and infection! the boat is appropriately treated like a spaceship, so while that means the ocean becomes mostly flavor text (as it were), at least it avoids being a lame monster movie. overall it's a fairly good 3.5 star workday type movie. soundtrack is pretty corny though.
• lake mungo (2008): the understated mockumentary style works beautifully here. the movie is very very good, super eerie. definitely recommend it. it's definitely the type of horror i find very creepy in a kinda literal sense. no catharsis, no closure, just unease throughout. mwah! chef's kiss!
• the haunting (1963): unreal that the opening narration doesn't start with Thee Opening Lines: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."!!! like come on what better way to start anything ever. anyway. the movie is fairly good on its own, but doesn't hold a candle to the book; feels lacking (it does cut off a whole lot). nell really breaks my heart of course.
• final destination (2000): the movie was translated to premonição, premonition, in brazil, which yeah man there sure are, it's so heavy handed it's kinda cute. viewing it with the context that it was originally planned as an x-files episode makes everything make sense. it's fun! pretty silly but it is well made, it has that spark of passion. also clear with her little bangs looks like laura palmer to me, i like her :)
• lemora (1973): surprisingly, i found it on youtube instantly, while there are no healthy torrents at all. just one of those odd things. sadly no subtitles however which made some parts hard for me to parse here and there. as usual, full review here.
• carmilla (1989): carmilla here reminds me of a high school friend i should have kissed. just a fun fact. you know the drill by now. this movie has moved into a nice little studio apartment in my mind, rather surprisingly given that it isn't particularly good on its own.
• carmilla (1980): she let me hit because C :). it's good!
• mamma mia! (2008): rewatch with my friends, it's funny how there always seems to be someone around who's never watched it? shame they never made a sequel :)
• underwater (2019): so underwhelming. it was fun enough to watch with friends but it'd have made me really sad if i watched it on my own because the monster is such lazy nonsense
• styria (2014): great carmilla adaptation!! watch this one!! review here.
• vampire in the garden (2022): the art style is really pleasant and i love the designs, the women all have a nice natural feel to them and the vampires get a little freaky.
• blood of the tribades (2016): they made a vampire movie that looks protestant :(. review here
• lake nowhere (2014): god this is 50 minutes (including trailers and commercials) of pure unrestrained slasher schlock. under a veneer of no thoughts head empty killing lies a really interesting story that ends perfectly unresolved. and my god it is dripping in so much style. it's a gorgeous homage to retro horror that also feels like the best of itchio indie games. on a metalevel, it's a found footage (even ""analog horror"") movie about the 19XX (it feels 70s to me but i heard 80s as well) lake nowhere itself, and it has a very delicate hand. i'm not saying it's subtle by any means, but it doesn't shove anything in your face, it shows masterful restraint in that regard. heavens this is what blood of the tribades should have been like tbh. watch it right now. i'm not asking.
• possession (1981): holy shit i get why people are obsessed iwth this movie. it's weirder than i expected, and isabelle adjani is a fucking tour de force. no wonder this role was exhausting for her. one thing i found super interesting was how the spaces all feel like they have so much put into them. the characters are constantly moving through places that are themselves characters, the way there are so many doors everywhere... a lot went into the architecture of this movie and i fucking love it.
• love bites (1992): not the 1993 one. this is a gay softcore horror-themed... romcom?. terribly dubious of course but the vampire at one point says something like "i met him at a grateful dead concert; ironic. he was very grateful and i was very—" and. i don't even know what to say that's just pretty funny. watch it here, it's really campy fun. unlike vampire boys i can see the appeal of this one for the right crowd, although i will say (let me have my critique ok) this is a very defanged vampire. do better. by the way the person who told me about it told me the vampire was really tall and like. yeah he's really tall. just passing that on. also i wound up writing a full review over on cohost, because that's where i put the vampire boys review so it felt appropriate.

it's annoying to pick favorite movies because i don't have letterboxd (STOP ASKING) so i can't quickly search for five stars like on storygraph. still, i'll say a couple favorites were lake nowhere (2014) and la morte vivante (1982). honorable mentions to carmilla (1980) and possession (1981). best series goes to succession (2018-2023), obviously. as for anime, otherside picnic (2021) and magia record (2021) were fun. i haven't actually watched the last ep of vampire in the garden (2022) yet but it's pretty good, and i'm also not caught up with mobile suit gundam: the witch from mercury (2022-) to properly assign them favorite status.

books and manga

• the enterprise of death (jesse bullington): i devoured the first quarter of this book in one night and then idk if the book got less interesting or if it was just me. ehh it's still pretty good, quite grisly, but it sorta fizzled out for me
• ficciones (jorge luis borges): revisiting borges my friend borges :)
• sphere (michael crichton): fuck this book honestly lmao. good premise hindered by an extremely white male author.
• solaris (stanisław lem): eugh. picture me, at the beach with my friends, chilling with my kindle and an overpriced beer. really amazing opening, right on the action, everything is already off and fucked up from the start. and then, on page 30, out of left field, my two own eyes are forced to read just such a vile racist passage i felt my soul leave my body. what is going on. the thing about such sickening racism is that i hangs over the rest of the narrative like an anvil on a cartoon, and i could no longer read in peace; i tense up at every new paragraph, bracing for new bullshit. anyway. the worldbuilding is this book's strongest suit, and when we get to a loredump it was easy to forget the looming threat. but the story is just not good so overall it was the most exhausting 200-ish pages i've read in a while with no payoff. it sucked.
• wuthering heights (emily brontë): oh dreadful little book it's very good. i get why it has such a cultural grip.
• the twenty days of turin (giorgio de maria): reread. it's a really interesting story, i love how i doesn't explain basically anything
• an unauthorised fan treatise (lauren james): i like the format and premise but there were several details that annoyed me. for starters, the fake photos not matching their descriptions. the deep web stuff was also kinda lame. it's is a good story though! i just tend to get needlessly caught up in these things.
• scorch atlas (blake butler): people are not exagerating when they say this book is bleak and nightmarish (as in, the stories literally follow nightmare logic). it's really well written too. i loved it.

this year hasn't been very good for books so far, i've got only 6/27 five star reads and half of them are re-reads. still, read entangled life by merlin sheldrake and stories of your life and others by ted chiang. or else. blame! and claymore take the prize for manga. dungeon meshi is great but it's ongoing.

see you soon! :)

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