april 2024

hi it's once again my birthday (or it was on april 30th, if you're reading on a day other than uh today). it's a good one! i'm feeling so good about my voice changes... i've always felt the high pitches of my voice to be strained and out of character. i'm now pretty consistently on a deeper region that's so much more grounded and right. like even beyond gender it's a matter of personality really. howeverrrrr now my mom's back home and uh idk how long i can keep this up. it is making me anxious as hell thanks for asking but i'll make everything work out eventually. probably.

new on the site: the rules to kabubi, a golf-variant card game i learned in highschool. have never found this specific ruleset online so i figured i might as well upload it. it's really fun at parties — and hey this way you have a nice written record so people don't have to keep asking which cards have what powers when learning (NOT a dig at anyone, i've done my fair share of forgetting and i'm being genuine)

veney. can't stop rotating it in my head. surprising no one, i really enjoy games birthed from concepts and poetics, even if i never expect to play them. it's like yuri chess. something very appealing about reading the rules to this intricate machine, i'm glad they're so long (there's a short version too). the beautiful abstract pieces help too.
in that same note, the game of nemoroth.
ecology in crimes of the future: a future without you
satirist's utena analyses. yeah plural. who up going absolutely crazy.

art

hell yeah time to post my 3ds stuff. mostly painted in march, and this isn't everything because i'm still keeping the stuff i submitted for the zine offline, and there's stuff i don't love enough to commit the storage space yet — they need a bit of polish, or just to linger on my hard drive forever. that last 10% of polish is kinda hard to do with art academy because thin hard edges are nearly impossible to achieve, plus the 3ds screen only gives a rough idea of what the finished result looks like. these are in some ways features not bugs though.

a thin white cilinder, spiked, lies horizontally on a hazy plain

upon a clay plain, under a beige sky, a sphere, a rectangular prism and a flat triangular prism

interlocked silver spires jut upwards from a field of dark blues and charcoal

two twisted red shapes. a light cream sky forms harsh black shadows on a colorful beige plain

i've been thinking of getting these printed out and making some papier mache frames for them, but at the same time there's something repulsively kitsch about the concept when i try and figure out the execution. dunno how to explain it. but given the low resolution these would be at their best printed tiny, and custom frames would give the resulting object a sense of purpose. digital art has always been a double edged sword. i enjoy the medium for its convenience but i dislike the flatness of prints, it all makes trying to submit my art to shows and stuff feel kinda yucky. so i don't do it even though i want to (and arguably Should). doesn't help that sifting through open calls and reading the paperwork and so on is a pain in the ass. i don't have the headspace for admin work like ever. oh well.

two abstract objects lie upon a plain, spikes interlocked suggesting scissoring

a dark gray and brown plain. two abstract objects lean against each other, nearly frotting

oh and also i think the future lies with playing around with making the objects suggestive. idk man. drawing erotica is fun but i get really tired of drawing humans it feels kinda bland in some ways. everyone throughout history has already had a shot at that, i'm not really skilled enough to make anything particularly interesting. and a lot of people have already done The Plain as well, so that can start feeling derivative fast too... but both together? well that feels like something fresh i'm doing. idk i think i'm struggling to find my artistic voice right now and this feels like a step in the right direction. i've made plenty of stuff that meant something personal or had like Concepts but i just don't feel like it rn — which is perfectly fine and has plenty of precedent but it makes it really hard to justify myself. sometimes you just wanna make nondescript objects mimicking human sex, but i don't think i have enough pure technical prowess to make this work on a "fine arts" level. man i'm just plagued by impostor syndrome.

yes as always this is also about my inability to plan my masters project, or even submit to any shows. this is getting embarassing.

oh and dusties for skiafray, mossfinch and large, from fr / the earth discord. the head shape is so hard... tbf it's my first time drawing them but also i feel the same about like half of the breeds on that website. oh well. it was fun to crank some guys out in half an hour like in the good old days. also — and this may be gauche to say — it's kinda nice posting something i can tag easily and then actually gets some visibility and does a few severals on cohost and tumblr.

portrait of a red dragon with blue neck fluff and antlers

portrait of a pale green dragon with reddish brown antlers and neck fluff

portrait of a dark brown and lilac dragon, with protuding red and purple spikes

media

games

observation (2020): playing again after exactly one year. i managed to finish the intro now! it says on steam it's just 4gb recommended ram, and i had 8 back then, so i don't think my upgrade really made a difference, but the controls feel playable now. still like ass though. fun part of playing an AI is not having a body but they thrust you into a standard flying sphere. fuck off this was supposed to be all fixed cameras and puzzles..... in other waters got the body part right, even if it's straightforward in gameplay.
sky: children of the light: yessss steam release! such a fun little game, tcg really knows what makes a good multiplayer (no chatting [ish] only chirping and gesturing). lmk if you play (comment on neocities or send me an email or whatever), we can add each other ^_^
three verses (2024): tasty.
haustor's abbey (2023): ough. gorgeous.
hands of the killer (2020): one of the strangest controlling games i've played in a while. it's neat.
scarlet manor: the heir (demo) (2024): eh it's alright. i think the demo is too short to really get a feel for the game, but the gameplay is pretty responsive and the puzzles were ok.
nowhere manor (demo) (2023): two brazilian game demos with manor in the name whadda hell. this is edgy as fuck but looks fresh enough that it's still interesting. visual novels that feel sluggish to play are the bane of my existence though, stop showing off your transition animations, let me read. so uh yeah i'll keep an eye on it but probably won't actually play the whole thing once it's out lol
isop0dyssey (2024): grimy... really cool game, nicely double features with the next one
how fish is made (2022): fucking banger. been meaning to check it out since jacob geller's video uhhhhh over a year ago. insane for a free half hour game but what can you do. maybe play the mouthwashing demo before the expansion. mainly because it's great but yknow.
morph girl (2017): you can watch the entirety of the brain that wouldn't die and attack of the giant leeches within this fmv horror game 👍. i don't think its mixed review status on steam is wholly deserved; the negative reviews i read seemed to come from distaste for the genre and/or visuals with a dash of homophobia. i do think it's kinda mid though, it's nothing that hasn't been done a bajillion times before. just because the person grieving the dead-from-cancer wife is a woman doesn't make the story any less boring; the horror is very tame, commonplace and predictable. i'm not even sure it feels right to call it a horror game honestly, it's a grief-drama.

also still on a board game mood, and i remembered i can use tabletop simulator through my friend's shared library. azul goes hard, i think i wanna buy it eventually. tried out bullet♥ too (yes i did play a board game inspired by bullet hells on tts what of it. it's pretty cool) and final girl (wish there was coop, i think unintentionally getting on each other's way could be interesting). it's fun being able to mess around for free with things that cost an arm and a leg to purchase.

movies and series

requiem (2021): (through gritted teeth) i will not hold this short's costumes to the standards of the vvitch. i will not.
eternal (2004): the 2000s are the curse that keeps on taking. at least it's not as bad as night fangs. full review on the lesbian vampires page.
romeo + juliet (1996): i forgot paul rudd was in this movie kjhsdakjsdhaskd fucking jumpscared me. anyway. holy shit man. did you know i actually started watching this movie in 2018 and then stopped because it got caught in buffering hell around the 50 minute mark? and then it went directly into my brain's limbo. all's well that ends well though (wrong play). wish this movie's art direction was a person that i may kiss them directly in the lips
rashomon (1950): ouhghhhh really fucking good movie. god tier camerawork. btw my first contact with this movie was with st vulture's game of the same name, which also has god tier camerawork in a way
late night with the devil (2023): eh it's alright. very frictionless, has its moments, but it's overall just a 3/5 yknow. it's not very scary (must a horror movie be scary? i don't necessarily think so, but yknow) and the climax is kinda lame. and it's giving analog horror in places too which i suppose is to be expected but i just don't like it. maybe my definition of analog horror as found footage i dislike is accurate sorry......
joker (2019): well what i really wanted to watch was the people's joker but alas i do not live in the u-ass-of-a so. time to catch up on this five year old movie in preparation for the musical sequel. yeah it's really good despite the heavy handed twisted fucking cycle path sometimes getting grating — that might be more the fault of five years of memes and cultural osmosis however. i fucking loved the whole talk show scene, i think camp joker is really really good. maybe drag queen joker would be "bad rep" but consider: i like having fun. also his theme, those dark strings, remind me so much of another instrumental i can't name, it drove me nuts the entire time. just the first few chords, and i could tell you exactly how they'd progress from there but of course you can't just google that yknow. ugh sickening.
immaculate (2024): cinemasins ding: catholic nun sees a person prostrate in front of an altar in a convent and asks if she's ok. come on that's like top 3 most normal positions for a nun to be in i think. well the movie packs a real fucking solid punch with its tight 80 minute runtime, it has some super tense sequences that take their time winding you up, and although it has some weird loose threads that i think were added just for the coolness factor, well, they were pretty cool so it's ok as long as you don't think about the first half of the movie too hard. also the costumes look really well made. nun horror movey :)
mulholland drive (2001): i wanna dissect this movie like a frog. thank you david lynch you drive me crazy.
castle of otranto (1977): pretty cool czech short by the director of lunacy (2005), which has been on my watchlist for ages. i'll get to it.

books and manga

the monster baru cormorant (seth dickinson): good lird. the first book is so good and then you get to this one and realize he was just warming up.

abysmal month for reading. due to the remodelling i spent pretty much the entire time sleep deprived. i can wake up early if i must but i cannot go to bed before midnight, and i find 8 hours to be barely enough sleep. as a result i was just too fucking tired all the time and could barely read one chapter a day. fucking miserable. not to mention my pdfs.

anyway, i'm currently reading the fourth murderbot diaries :)

till next month ^_^

index