index

november 2023

hi! back at it again with another artlog, this month kinda flew by. no site updates, no personal blogging — except to mention (since i talked about my ipod before), that i found out that little bastard just doesn't respect the pause button. it will stay put for a while, but then you put the earbuds back on and it just. has been playing your album for the past few minutes. or you've finished your album and now it's playing your entire library on shuffle. thought i was going insane who the fuck wants that. doesn't help that my earbuds are failing and giving some weird ghost inputs too. might have to get a real mp3 player soon.

• mãe que dá medo - manejo fálico
• dak and the golden age of gadget catalogs
• how, after long fighting, galehaut was overcome by lancelot yet was not slain and made great speed to yield to friendship; or, galehaut, the knight of the forfeit. not my first time reading this short story (i found it last year after reading lancelot and the lord of the distant isles: or, the book of galehaut retold — which drove me insane), and i didn't like it that much my first time around, but there's a paragraph of it that lives in my head rent free and i thought about it a lot this month:

  So I knocked everybody down. Men begged me to hit them. Men who had never known what to ask for in their life, men who fell silent at the sight of the Grail maiden and neglected to ask the Fisher King what ailed him, men who could barely mumble along in Mass suddenly found their tongues on my field and chased me out: “Galehaut, best of knights! Galehaut, so courtly in victory! Galehaut the forbearant, the loyal, the hardy, test your hardiness on me — throw me down — dismount me — knock me off — grant me the honor of your fist, Galehaut, fuck me up, Galehaut, fuck me up, Galehaut, I haven’t seen my father in sixteen years but send me home to him wearing your bruises and I can say I was truly a knight. Galehaut, I’m begging you, trample me, make much of me, make a mess of me, just this once lay waste to me and I’ll gladly follow you wherever you go.”

art

art has been uhh. i wanna become a big old nerd wholeheartedly devoted to my own work but unfortunately i go through the trenches relentlessly. well. i might be clawing my way out into we're so back territory. as long as i don't think about hrt i'm fine.

painted this one on the 27th after nearly two months of nothing lmao. i knowwww resting periods and whatever but it gnaws at me not to create.

i also made a "pre-study" — no real reference vibes-only — and real study of an yves tanguy painting. the study is kinda whatever so i put a kaleidoscope'd version of it. you can click for the OG.

media

games

• teleforum (2023): neat little found footage vn. ymmv on scares, but i think it looks great and it's very tight. but i really wish it had a skip / auto / fast forward button. it wouldn't even break immersion since it's framed as videotapes and there are dead end rewinds; it would make replaying much more pleasant — especially on steam where you get kinda compelled to go achievement hunting. of course, i'm not too sure the devs are aware they made a vn so maybe it didn't cross their mind. this got a small update today (november 30th) actually, and it was pretty neat. i'm curious for the devs future games ^_^

movies and series

• saw iv (2007): rigg's game is soooooo lame, i don't really like cop investigation plots, and this one is sooo ideologically murky (in typical saw fashion). sigh. my friend liked it though so. good for her.
• prehistoric cabaret (2013)
• strange way of life (2023)
• aphotic zone (2022)
• five nights at freddy's (2023): did not pay + scott cawthorn can rot in hell. anyway i know jack shit about the franchise and the movie is bad but it was a fucking blast to watch with friends, i can't believe they didn't set out to make a horror comedy. solid 2.5 star affair. i really don't wanna spoil one specific thing that took us by surprise, so i'll just say it has a bizarrely funny bait and switch. my friend got jumpscared every time balloon boy appeared, and only when balloon boy appeared. one of the best bonding activities i've had in a while.
• saw v (2008): yayy i like this one. one of my favorite games, i like it when there's room for the relationship between the people in the trap. and i think it's a pretty clever one. the lack of a Big twist at the end can be kinda lame after getting used to them throughout the series, but it's here to wrap up the previous two movies so it's fine. excited for the next two, which are really fun. i'm neutral on jigsaw and we'll definitely be skipping spiral (it's standalone anyway so we don't need it for x. and it SUCKS)
• bottoms (2023): HAZEL CHARACTER OF ALL TIME!! this was fun, i really intended to watch it when it came out but yknow i'm a fake dyke when it comes to media.
• the autopsy of jane doe (2016): really good movie. creepy. single location horror always a welcome sight. if i can be nitpicky for a second though, it's implied her waist is abnormally thin because she wore corsets but 1) 17th century is the wrong time period for that 2) i just don't think that's true. i don't think that's physically possible even with victorian corsets unless you're doing some real intense tight lacing / waist training. ultimately inconsequential though, and at least they did explicitly say no people killed in the salem trials were actually witches, and i appreciate that. coincidentally this is from the same director as the last voyage of the demeter (2023). just a fun fact
• the rage: carrie 2 (1999): oh man. i mean. carrie (1976) is some huge shoes to fill so that could never be a point of comparison. on it own though, it's for most of its runtime a bad teen movie, so when it comes to the big gory neo-prom scene the payoff doesn't feel as cathartic as it could. my gripe with this movie is very simple: where's the fucking rage. i think it's got a very promising idea (fucking jocks counting points for having sex with girls), but rachel isn't a very strong protagonist and we don't get to see her empowerment as well. stylistically pretty boring too. so while there's nothing egregiously terrible with it, the movie is just forgettable.
• the conjuring (2013): this movie is so not my style it's crazy. it has a couple of nice scares, i'll give it that, but it's kinda bland, the structure isn't very tense to me. still i had to watch it because it was so famous when i was in middle school
• paranormal activity 4 (2012): no i have not watched the previous two because the first one is so lame. however i have a friend who thinks this is the scariest movie ever (yes we make fun of him relentlessly for it / his fear of furniture) so i've been meaning to watch it for months now. i'd love to watch it with him but i haven't been able to persuade him into it. i do think it's better than the first but it's such a drag, it sucks ass.
• scavengers reign (2023): this is so me it's unreal. gorgeous art, the alien designs are all really really good, and the pacing allows you to really savor all that. god i'm in love. need season two right nowwww. absolutely must watch if you're into weird scifi.
• the curse (2023): nathan fielder's other stuff isn't really my vibe but the premise of this one sounded super interesting and my friend's are fieldheads. nice to have a long term series too! i'll say i was a bit disappointed that it's not framed entirely as a hgtv house flipping show gone wrong, but it works like a straightforward cringe-comedy too so it's fine. also jesus good thing it's only one episode a week, because one whole ass hour of this intense cringing would kill me dead
• planet of the vampire women (2011): fun fact this was released on my birthday. pure tubi trash, came across it a while back and had it bookmarked from when i wanted to not actually watch anything. on that day there were actually a couple better movies i wanted to watch but i needed something 90 minutes and that wasn't a ten seeder torrent. anyway. boring ass (and boob) movie. crawling pace. not a lot of vampire women. i appreciate the 'filmed entirely in a warehouse' look though, there's some neat gore, some of the actors are fun (i liked ginger ^_^). it could have been enjoyable with a 40-50 minute runtime maybe, and on lesbian hands. man 2010's male gaze lez-undertones shit is boring as hell can you quit it with the catfighting
• talk to me (2022): good movie, though not really my vibe. it has good scares and is tense but i felt the protag was maybe a bit undercooked? some plot contrivances as well but that's mostly alright.
• crimson peak (2015): goddddd. del toro has never made a bad movie in his life i'm afraid.
• picnic at hanging rock (2018): i 100% started this to indulge in the costumes. and natalie dormer. they slay. the hair is kinda lackluster though. but it's really very gripping, i think it was rather slept on (basing myself purely on torrent health as usual). love some of the homoerotic subtext / undertones being fully explicit, although the mike/albert dynamic got undercooked (maybe i just read the book too close to watching maurice) — but it's best to not think about the novel too much while watching; i liked how the novel felt unresolved, but here it feels like a universe where they did solve / reveal what happened. it stands on its own quite well.

books and manga

• spear (nicola griffith): really liked it!
• valerin the fair (rien gray): i think the writing style is kinda thesaurus-core and didn't care for the straightforward romance but to each their own.
• exhalation: stories (ted chiang): TED CHIANG AUAUAUUAUUUAUAUAUU !! i love his stories so much, he has such a grasp on style and the subjects are always so interesting. fav was probably the titular, also loved the merchant and the alchemist's gate and omphalos. but like. they're all great.
• the once and future sex (eleanor janega): definitely pop in tone, but at least with less distate for its own subject than something like quackery. for a book by a medieval historian, i really found it lacking in citations of other scholars — paired with the casual this-author-has-twitter tone it makes the book sound superficial. i also feel it centers the hegemonic ideas towards women and sex in lieu of necessarily the actual life experiences of women. sure, the catholic church and philophers said such and such things about gender and love and pleasure, but i went into the book wanting to also learn about the actual lives of these people. so yeah of course the priests said women shouldn't have orgasms, what else can you add to the conversation yknow?
• uzumaki (junji ito): yayy! can you believe this was my first time really reading junji ito? except for the enigma of amigara fault (super fun). this was nice! i love his art, i like the structure where it's rather episodic but still building up, the stories are very cool, the ending is romantic (!). he definitely deserves his praise
• her body and other parties (carmen maria machado): nearly dnf because after reading the first three i realized i wasn't really enjoying myself. had to skip the svu novella to power through; good concept, i really really wanted to like it but it was mind numbing boring in execution. i suppose she is a good writer but most of her stories feel like they end before climaxing, so while i liked the resident, it ended suddenly just as it was really getting good. and i just felt really tired of women's misery, for lack of a better word. does it make me a bad feminist to find it trite? i think i'm just too young and don't like ~powerful books~. i don't get the hype around her. tbh.
• crash (j. g. ballard): hell yeahhh. the pacing is interesting, it's rather erratic. there isn't much correlation in how much time an event takes and how long its described. it's also somewhat clinical and formal. i mean this in a good way. one thing that kinda lightly puzzled me though; i have zero car sex experience so i just assume ballard did his research but those cars seem big as fuck. am i just too used to tiny hatchbacks? anyway, i liked the book, good complement to the movie (neeeed to rewatch it). i particularly liked the way ballard (the narrator) talks about his attraction to vaughan. not elaborating on that.
• vermis ii (plastiboo): vermissss!!! sadly stayed it's been at 30% read at my bedside for days despite my excitement to receive it. it's very high quality, i love holding it. great illustrations of course. i love you vermis i'll give you my full attention soon
• un ensayo autobiográfico (jorge luis borges): i believe this is the full text in english, published by new yorker magazine. i got it at a used bookshop, while looking for physical copies of literally any of his work without shipping (i only own the aleph). it's interesting
• kase-san and... (hiromi takashima): really sweet slice of life yuri but at times that gave me such an uneasy feeling, like retroactive fomo. i don't really care that something good happened to fictional characters in high school it should have happened to me instead.......... for the right person this'd be a really nice short manga though.
• chlorine (jade song): strong concept — self-surgery as transcendence by a trans author! same hat! — but i think it falters on execution. this silly little review became a whole thing with quotes from the forbidden body so it's in full on cohost instead. it's not as long as my review of the genesis of misery, don't worry. just around 600 words i think.

see you soon!

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