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september 2023

hi howdy how are you. i have truly officially moved out of hell. into perhaps a different hell now that my boss can nag me about going to the office because of course you really need me to take two buses (realistically an uber and a train) to sit in front of a computer at a different spot of the city for eight hours. need to get more driving practice and just take me and our little hatchback directly into rush hour traffic stress. that surely can't go bad at all. and then i can't even play touhou. but it feels good to actually have stuff to do on the weekends. i may be a lazy homebody but i also am a big city kinda guy. though i do always wish there was a park within walking distance of me so i could just get out the door without a specific destination. well there's always going to the grocery store to buy a single croissant.

all that's left is yknow. hrt. i am really not looking forward to scouting an endo, specially after i did get a remote appointment and was simply ignored. but i've drunk ranted about all this to my friend already, so you get just the short version. but well, at least i should be able to count on my friends for help. that's why the order has always been to move before seeking hrt. support system and all that. also more options here. really wanna get some progress before the year ends. my new years resolution you might say. oh well.

new on the site: very much related to the above paragraph, i worked some more on dataplankton (btw i don't tend to italicize it because it doesn't feel like a title to me. i am so very bad at names though). i'm still not entirely sure how or where i plan on ending it. my initial plan for this (i even have the paper mini mockup laying around from when was considering making it a zine) was for the 'protagonist' (as it were) to bring about an apocalypse. but well that kind of apocalypse is the one on technobiogenesis, and i feel this project is currently more aligned with the post-human t4t indulgence in some ways. my work on it is at such a slow pace and long time scale that it just goes with the flow of my brain.

right now i'm thinking (and i'm putting a spoiler tag just in case... idk, you don't wanna be spoiled on this silly little short story?) the mycelium protag might go for a soft hazy desert while the babel protag actually gets to have the world ended for them. my issues with both of these are, however, that the desert disregards basically every other species + the real habitats of earth that should be rebuilt, and the 'governments destroy the world trying to erradicate trans person' removes babel's agency while giving them exactly what they want in a way. on the other hand, this has never not been a selfish story, and i'm so clearly metaphorical / alegorical everywhere that thinking of the consequences in literal terms is rather nonsensical. i mean in the end the story is just me struggling with how i wish everything could be different.

some other stuff:

• a discourse on inversion among the inhabitants of flatland, a short fic i unexpectedly stumbled upon. it's interesting; just the metadata box already paints a beautiful picture, you don't even have to read it lmao. i didn't even really like flatland that much but i believe in their beliefs or something
• oh, and here's a gift: readable unstyled pages bookmarklet. i picked it up at maya.land and you can also just favorite it from here. it's a godsend; pair it with changing the default background color on your browser settings.
• by the way, i highly recommend the bookmarklets context menu extension. it's a great little quality of life thing. while we're here, pick up kill sticky, which disappears elements with position: fixed;. it's great for uncluttering many webpages, i've had it saved for years
• the gender accelerationist manifesto: "Because sex isn’t some inherent thing, but an element of gender’s superstructure, it has changed over time. The earliest people could only have gendered the features that are plainly visible, such as genitals. It’s only as our understanding of anatomy progressed that we were able to gender things like ovaries. Most recently, chromosomes have been gendered because of their relationship to features we’ve already gendered. ". great writing

art

explicit-ish

would love to turn this one into a proper painting but ehh. some tricky anatomy spots and i find painting figures rather uninteresting honestly. i'd like to see the result but don't care about the process enough to materialize it.

media

games

• goodbye volcano high (2023): didn't really love the gameplay. i really hate that it's auto save only. might be to avoid save scumming choices or whatever but also that's at the core of vns as a genre? plus since there's no skip if you had to put the game down in between saves you're forced to go through everything again. idk i know the style they're going for is cinematic, like an interactive animation, but 👉👈 i think some of the creature comforts of visual novels would have been nice; and the sprites on the d&d segments where it looks like a conventional vn are super nice. the rhythm segments are... alright. the mechanics are a cool idea but i found it hard to really grasp the rhythm since the beats are very spaced out. there's a lot of multitasking but the most frequent notes are in the analog stick, which you can just hold in place. so i never felt i was actually on rhythm. wish there were lyrics on screen since they're prolly important but at the same time i don't think it'd be possible to keep track of all that. anyway, haven't finished yet
• chants of sennaar (2023): you take a single look at this game and you already know i'm gonna play it. tower of babel inspired language puzzle game? come on. sadly while the core concept / mechanic of translation is strong, the game never fully gels together. even beyond the baffling choice of adding stealth and timing based segments, the click-to-walk movement makes backtracking absolutely grueling, the art style doesn't really complement the environments — it often doesn't even feel like a massive tower —, and the story is honestly just lame. the game took me 6-ish hours (100% word completion and perfect ending) and it really started to get grating by then. and it was expensive too. sigh. i should just reread ted chiang's tower of babylon instead.
• milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk (2021): god this game looks and sounds really really good. it's a bit hard to talk about the story i think. it's quite strong. i liked it.
• com__het (2023): a quite clever short vn. nice use of the medium. pretty good allegorical story too ^_^
• feydome (2023): cute little game! the lack of up-down camera kinda bothered me, it makes me feel rather cramped, nearly nauseous. but it is what it is, and the concept of an exploration dress up game is super nice, i'm always interested on new things in that genre ^_^ (still aching about not really knowing anything about poupee girl. i'd kinda like to check out that invite only remake)

movies and series

• adventure time: fionna and cake (2023): omg yes! it's so good! it's very much my hole it was made for me; i'm literally the target demographic afterall. the tone simply feels so right. not caught up with the latest two eps btw.
• serial experiments lain (1998): even though i watched it for the first time fairly recently (mid 2020?) this was a very overdue rewatch. god this anime looks so damn good. love the story too. it's rather relaxing to me, it's mostly quiet and understated
• riverdale (2017-2023): yes! i finally got around starting it. 137 episodes is a tall order but i'll take it easy. my main impression so far is that it's so television. everything feels very natural not because it's realistic or anything, but because it's always 100% television all the time, stylistically. the cuts are often placed in such weird spots it borders on disorienting. i think they're in on the joke too. it's rather deeply honest and earnest? not exactly like they're playing it straight, but more like when you joke about something with full sentiment behind it? and even at its most contrived characters just straight up communicate, which is truly very nice. idk the vibe is also kinda the snippets of lore from the sims. this show might be the closest thing in the world to a the sims adaptation honestly. also i've always known how jughead is but seeing him in motion it's insane how much he really is just like thee popular indie guy who was one year above us in high school. saur annoying too. hate his voice. jughead's, not knockoff alex turner.
• saw (2004): yipee saw rewatch! my friend watched it for the first time and not only did she like it, she wants to watch the other movies too B)

books and manga

• the genesis of misery (neon yang): was swimming upstream at this one because i just have no longer have any patience for a protagonist that's just the specialest little birthday boy. and it's just a bad book overall. full review on cohost, it's twice as long than my average marrow article here on the site. somehow. should i mirror it here as well? (it's already in gemini)
• chasing after aoi kishiba (hazuki takeoka): oughh.
• fight club (chuck palahniuk): yeah, just like the movie it really is as good as people say it is. the writing style is so good, it's packed and straightforward, it's so fitting. five star read for sure.
• knights of sidonia (tsutomu nihei): i was initially surprised that this seems to be nihei's most well known work; i just sorta assumed blame! was His Thing. but it makes sense. knights of sidonia is a lot more approachable, it has a lot more mainstream appeal. the art is nice as ever, but my aesthetic heart lies within the sexy sexy megastructures. it's a nice mecha though. all the little romance things around nagate feel so weird. not like when i say "it's weird that xyz", just a little unexpected? why are all those women (and one nb person) so into him he's just some guy. (← i'm always saying this. about real people too. art imitates life)
• dungeon meshi (ryōko kui): can't believe it's over already omg..... it's so good.... excited for the anime too :)
• inside mari (shūzō oshimi): really good. i felt the pacing was maybe a little too fast to really hit emotionally though — but at the same time, when i started ruminating on it for this review, it makes sense. the desperation makes sense. i see it on my own work. and i myself double featured it with welcome back, alice, 120 chapters of manga in a single day. within 12 hours of having learned of them.
• welcome back, alice (shūzō oshimi): i think it's a sharper exploration of its themes than inside mari, although i feel the same about the pace. and i think it'd be fair to say kei is ""bad rep"", a stereotypical hypersexual transfem. but (and i'll preface by saying i'm not under the heel of transmisogyny) that feels like missing the point and i really like them (the scanlation i read uses he/him because the character uses the masculine "boku" but. idk). i think they tap into some very real feelings and it makes sense for the story to go all in — it wouldn't do to show restraint. i think it's particularly fitting that they're in highschool, although i don't think i'd have liked it in highschool. in a way they're a power fantasy, a sublimation of what can feel like some really ugly and selfish feelings. you see your cis friends suffering and you want to tell them you can step down from being a man / woman, and it feels like kei is going for the shortest, bluntest path just get to the point already. sex is far from straightforward but there's the appeal on bypassing the rational to speak directly to the primal brain and letting them work it out. god i really liked this one, gonna be thinking about it for a while.
• doughnuts under a crescent moon (shio usui): it's cute ^_^
• qualia the purple (hisamitsu ueo & shirou tsunashima): yes i am very normal about doomed yuri and can be trusted with this manga. it's pretty conceptually dense at times but i love how laser focused it is. which makes a lot of sense for the story. it slightly predates pmmm, and while i haven't really seen it mentioned as an inspiration / influence, there are some similarities. this was a good read, definitely reccommend it. especially if homura/madoka makes you lose control.
• couple of the white room (ryoko yamagishi): hell yeah thee first (ish?) yuri. i love the care put into fashion here (i tend to always notice contemporary fashion in manga ^_^). it's so deeply 1971, it's really nice. the setting too, made me miss giallo. i should have gone deeper into my giallo spree but it's kinda annoying to track down online. uh anyway the manga doesn't have anything to do with that. it's a neat little tragic oneshot.
• leech (hiron ennes): ooooh the pov is so nice here, first person hivemind is a really interesting viewpoint to inhabit. i like how slowly it reveals its hand with worldbuilding. i quite liked it! good horror. one peeve though, i knowwwww it makes thematic sense that the institute is an evil parasite and that it's also a metaphor etc etc but like. parasitism is morally neutral :( although its methods are incompatible with human morality, it also can't quite help itself, and i think it flopped a bit on the third act for me because i was sympathizing with the body's complete alienation from the rest of itself, as well as expecting a bit more idk hard scifi worldbuilding. it's still a good read, just not 100% my hole.
• the salt grows heavy (cassandra khaw): fun fact this took me pretty much as long as aphex twin's selected ambient works 85-92 to complete. just two minutes faster. it's pretty good. i think it's funny how many of the reviews are complaining about the language being too ornate but like... it's first person pov, that's just characterization. also skill issue.

see you space cowboy...

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