index

february 2024

hii howdy. personal blogging, personal blogging. not much to say. let's see.

i realized i never mentioned it here despite complaining about it all the time, but i'm still going insane with the construction right under my window that's been going for uhh five months now? basically since i moved back here. truly don't know how it's taking so long. inclined to believe they jackhammer the ground during the day and then replace the flooring at night, reverse penelope style. please i'd like to wake up without a wall of noise more than two days a week.

also i speaking of things that have been ongoing since i moved: my wardrobelessness is finally over. got a lovely antique that absolutely does not match my dresser and bookshelf, a bit on the smaller side so i need to downsize my stuff a bit. my wardobe (as in, the clothes i own as a collective) has grown a bit unruly these past few years and this heavy pruning is way overdue. perhaps especially my jackets. since high school i have grown a rather unreasonably large jacket collection for the barely subtropical climate i inhabit.

transition updates: i'm at 10 weeks now. happy trail has been thickening above the bellybutton, and it's off center. voice slowly but surely dipping, and also squeaking lmao. my singing can get very dubious. rip fallen we've had a good run. i'm loving it :thumbsup:

• we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven: unreal. hypnotic.
• the haunted worlds of a mysterious developer...: a retrospective / overview on kittyhorrorshow's games ^_^

art

commission for zaelly over at flight rising ^_^

acrylic on canvas baybee. didn't manage my one painting a week goal for february but that's ok. i've got a second one halfway-ish done but i'm not really looking forward to rendering it, i need to figure something out.

media

games

• polytope (2022): sexy
• the case of the golden idol (2022): it's a fun little puzzle, very enjoyable way to spend a couple hours, but uhhh overall a bit of a mid game to be completely honest. since they get compared so often i'm gonna do it too, and say return of the obra dinn felt wayyy more fulfilling, especially in terms of story and difficulty (i suppose it's a better mystery and i like the simple consistent structure better). this is in some ways kinda like a flash game i'd play online, in some ways like a 3 star murder mystery short story collection (because the individual scenes don't quite gel into an overarching mystery) i'd buy as a pocket book, which isn't a bad thing to be. the dlcs though. pretty bad.
• the last winter knight (demo) (2024): eating this upppp. stunning art, great music, and of course how could i not read a melancholy vn with an empty suit of armor.
• indika (demo) (2024): my god it wants to be a AAA game so bad and it absolutely does not work. i assume this is what god of war 2 is like, except it mentions puzzles pretty prominently on the steam page. so you'd think they'd let you solve them by yourself. i also think it should look more lofi or stylized but maybe it just looks like shit because i played on medium graphics — and had bad performance, but it's a demo so a little jank is fine. regardless. didn't like :/
• ultros (demo) (2024): great looking metroidvania, plays very well. i think this will have some wild movement tech. not great to play on keyboard but that's on me. feel this will get endlessly compared to hollow knight and rainworld. will play the full game once i whittled my library down further (hopefully it'll get a chunky sale too lol)
• death of the reprobate (demo) (2024): cool point and click, i've had the other games in this series on my wishlist for a while too. point and click always makes me a bit nostalgic, and this is a nice more casual game too. weirdly enough it cut me off after solving the first "major" puzzle, even though it felt like i'd be able to solve two. not a big deal on a demo, just surprised me because i already had one item to solve the other one, and that was the first puzzle the game introduced to begin with?
• mouthwashing (demo) (2024): from the devs of how fish is made (which i admit i haven't played yet despite being free and downloaded on my pc for months). really good structure and visuals, the kind of setting i adore (single location horror babeyy). very tasty demo, made me crave more. will most certainly buy this when it comes out
• hauntii (demo) (2024): cute but it seems grown in a lab to be beautiful and touching in a way that i always hate. if i can be mean for a sec: what if super mario odyssey was 2d crybait. i believe it's a timed demo at 30 minutes because it just faded me to black in a weird way?
• cabernet (demo) (2024): can't say i loved the art style. it's also certainly not disco elysium. idk it's fine but mostly unremarkable to me
• blood4blood (2024): ooo i'm so normal. butch vampire lesbian sex :thumbsup:
• pokémon quarantine crystal (demo v0.8) (2024): ughh i love this fakedex so much and the gbc is gorgeous. however. gen ii is a grind and i can't use cheats on mgba (i play on my 3ds, and i'm not even sure the romhack would handle it). i'm chronically underleveled; skill issue maybe.
• eclupsium (demo) (2024): oooooh this is so cool. messing up with the space works so well in videogames..... excited for the full release

lots of demos from steam next fest ^_^. i still need to go through more vampjamp games, and i'm playing pathologic again (albeit kinda slowly)

movies and series

• poor things (2023): ahhh great ass movie. loved the soundtrack a lot. pretty funny. great performances. mwah!
• the hitcher (1986): witness a man make series of the worst possible decisions in any given situation. boy are you stupid. why are you holding two cops at gunpoint brother. to be fair his options are subpar but still. idk. kinda mid
• the fly (1986): godd i love 80s fashion so muchh ronnie slays. disgusting movie, really good!
• excalibur (1981): i haaate arthur's voice... the movie has its moments, some neat costumes (i appreciate the anachronistic dresses and headpieces and stuff. they're pretty and don't really break the vibe because arthuriana seldom is historically accurate. i can be hypocritical as treat) and set designs too, but i overall didn't like it much. it's very sprawling because it's covering the whole of le morte d'arthur, which i just didn't like because i usually prefer tighter movies, and also because it gets rather hard to follow if you're not already familiar with the legends, since it doesn't linger on any one thing.
• the devils (1971): love madeleine's haircut, very pretty. the movie as a whole slays visually, although i wish grandier didn't look like the most 70s man on earth (it suits him but maybe not for this movie...) — i think a larger commitment to the 17th century could have made the stylization even better. but that's ok, it's not really hindering the movie. it's a cool story too. thank you ken russell of lair of the white worm fame. my one complaint is that while i understand the trimming i wish there was more of the convent / sister jeanne. but then of course i'd say that, i'm very predictable. that's ok i'll watch the 1961 polish version of this story.
• orlando (1992): oh how wonderful to live in a world where i can have tilda swinton in 1600s menswear on my computer at any time. i was actively drooling. the movie looks gorgeousss and that's not just because she has me acting unwise. need to reread the novel.
• aniara (2018): oooh good movie. it's been a while since i watched something that felt so Science Fiction. it's based on a poem which i only found out after watching and really made sense to me. it's a pretty literary feeling movie. give it a go.
• eraserhead (1977): lynch works so well with black and white. and i personally always love how blood is black in bw movies, the way you can't be sure if it isn't another fluid, really works in something like this. subtitles (english) were 31.5 seconds early (watched on stremio [criterion collection] with the open subtitles add on)
• 2001: a space odyssey: the soundtrack reminds me of disco elysium at times, i wonder if it was intentional. it's a very meticulous movie; it really wants you to know the nitty gritty of the worldbuilding and stuff, which is why it's so long, and it's stuff we perhaps usually take for granted in more recent scifi. i didn't really like it very much tbh i like the story (i read the novelization ages ago) but found this pacing disagreeable.
• the boy and the heron (2023): nice movey. love the heron's design ^_^
• hearts and armour (1983): this movie is like. obsessed with sexual assault. two nearly identical scenes within the first 15 minutes and that's not even the end of it. i wish i was joking. give me a fucking break. the story was rather hard to follow, not helped by everyone looking the same — and especially since ruggiero and angelica are white (in fact i think like half the cast here shouldn't be white). apparently there was a longer version broadcast as a mini series which could also explain it. well. the matter of france isn't as popular as arthuriana (french wikipedia lists only 6 movies. there's a few operas too) and i'm not reading orlando innamorato and furioso any time soon so this will have to do for other depictions of bradamante. um at least the music is pretty good i guess (thanks italy), and the moment where bradamante gets her armor, lifting a knight's visor to reveal the suit is empty, is a pretty cool 60 seconds. but yeah it's bad and a slog and i hated it

books and manga

• shoujo pandora (senno knife): nice collection of horror oneshots, i like the art style too
• night theater (vikram paralkar): really good
• women artists and the surrealist movement (whitney chadwick): this book was a pain to go through because the scan is so low contrast i was struggling to read it on the small screen of the ancient ipad mini i use for pdfs. sigh. also it just... wasn't all that interesting idk something about the structure made it an uphill battle — it's split by theme rather than artist, so it jumps around a lot and in the end i didn't really have a feel for any one artist's work, and the themes were not exclusive to women artists so the book felt incomplete. only finished it because i specifically made it a february goal tbh
• silver under nightfall (rin chupeco): i read the first chapter and knew the book would be mid at best. and kept going because i simply wanted no thoughts head empty stuff. shouldn't have though, it's just so boring and unimaginative. i don't wanna call it filed off serials castlevania fanfic, in part because that's somewhat meaningless as criticism, in part because i don't know enough about the games. but i (and other reviewers) did get some vibes while reading, and the reliance on stock characters, dynamics and settings really puts it on my mind. full review on storygraph (just a couple paragraphs, i just didn't wanna clutter here)
• goodbye eri (tatsuki fujimoto): goes hard. really like fujimoto's style and his cinephilia, and the meta aspects are really good.
• all systems red (martha wells): can you believe i haven't read the murderbot diaries before. considering my mutual circle it's so out of character. to be fair i don't really like reading series anymore. anyway it's a nice and light book, well written too.
• artificial condition (martha wells): read in one sitting. very fun, i really liked ART. i like it when a big object is a person. and as much as i love dense and hard sci-fi i am a big hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy fan and this sort of stuff is very cozy. humor is definitely usamerican instead of british though.
• the traitor baru cormorant (seth dickinson): it's very very good. went in not really knowing what to expect and wow

byee!

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