march 2025

oh hi. entirely forgot to write a blogging segment this month i'll be honest. it hasn't been easy ok... but i've made stuff!

new on the site: beyond the third piece: understanding layers and depth, a fashion article from me to you. planning a second part, i'll get to it i prommy!

new elsewhere: new vn dropped!! a machine walks on the beach at night. it's short and sweet and i made it in a week. i made music for it! the titular machine gets all wet and shiny and has abstract erotic encounters! read it now! more about it on this log, right after the links list ^_^

pretty pretty please i don't want to be a magical girl (pilot animatic). yay and yippee! it's out!
why permadeath matters. interesting video even if don't 100% agree with his opinion. i think he's right that saves are very much taken for granted as the default state of game design, and i'm always interested on questioning what we view as Good Game Design, and in this case specifically the view of (games) history as linear improvement. while i have a couple games that shift me into git gud mode (i'm aware of this channel in the first place because of my vague interest in stgs / bullet hells) i'm not a skill oriented player as a rule so i don't find the high stakes of permadeath and similar mechanics to be important motivators. however i do think the roguelike saturation is in part a sign of yearning for that arcadey permadeath, and heavy reliance on metaprogression is hindering the genre. this is an incomplete read: live service games have created on some game designers a perceived need for constant updates and keeping players hooked for longer, and roguelikes are pretty good for that. i say perceived because i think the players who whine about replay value and dollars per hour are a vocal minority. but uh yeah one thing that often puts me off about roguelikes is the expectation of grinding to unlock shit versus improving yourself, because i don't like it when games feel like chores. idk! i just really like it when your knowledge as a player is taken into account by the game design, and i suppose this is an extension of that, only in a different way. anyway yeah video got me thinking.
guide to using calibre's "kindle collections" plugin to manage collections on your pc. this is the most straightforward resource i've found for jailbreaking this little guy, and collections are basically the only point of doing so, since an ereader is a single use device. btw fw version 5.3 sucks ass because it has garbage ui when it comes to dictionary lookup and you can't view page number, only position. downgrade to 5.4.4.2 (direct download) instead.
my octopus girlfriend.
lena.
the other AI art.
anatomy and the eight-legged beast. ok severely slept on youtube channel found. very interesting production, with a vibe closer to a idiosyncratic blog or zine! super cool.
my casual god. look sometimes research means going on ao3 and look for explicit fic of the ultrakill earthmover. what do you mean there's only one. who said that.
what does it actually mean for a video game to be "horny"?. welcome back "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny". see also these bsky posts. maybe i should play a horny survivors clone just to feel something.
yuri evn webring. it's a pretty new project and i hope it thrives. go play some yuri, and submit your vn if you have one! let's go lesbians ^_^
a 1-star review of slay the princess, a terrible game. ohohoho. interesting video. i haven't played slay the princess, as usually happens with hyped up games, but i have seen exactly one person criticize it, and it was in a way that lodged into my brain. so getting this one on my newsboat via sortition social was a treat. the intro really sold the review for me, because the thing about ironic oelvns is very real and true. i find fiction that attempts to distance itself from its own medium and genre extremely tiresome, and i hate being condescended to. rip disco elysium you'll always be famous.

art

more importantly: the new vn!

a machine walks on the beach at night is my first chunky project in a while, and i'm pretty happy with it. i've been wanting to make another vn for some time now. i came up with the idea because i really wanted to paint some dark cloudy skies, and it's more of a mood piece than anything else, but there's also a lot more to say so i figured i'd make a dev log about it. the word count here is longer than the vn itself btw (writing fiction...).

music

i'd thought of just using a wave / beach ambience from freesound but making music is also something i've been wanting to Seriously Try, and i figured this was a good opportunity for that. since that's kinda the one new thing i did i figured i'd talk about the process more in depth ^_^

so the track is obviously split between the drone and a looping melody. i started with the latter; it's made on the 3ds (yippee!), with korg m01d, which is a m1 emulator. it's pretty nice to play around with. i don't really know enough music theory and didn't really wanna get too sidetracked learning music production (not if i wanted to get the vn out this month, which i did both for nanoreno and so it could be eligible for this year's queer games bundle). so i just read some reddit threads about making dark ambient and played around until i had something i liked: i aimed for something low pitched and uncomplicated, and i like the result.

then i reached my first (and only) snag, which is the fact m01d only exports midis, but that's useless without the correct soundfont. also i don't know how to deal with midis at all. i could have recorded the loop straight from the 3ds with audacity, but i couldn't find and aux cord and buying one online felt stupid. so i did the next best thing and imported the midi into beepbox, changing the instruments into reasonable aproximations of the original. it doesn't sound quite right, but that's where the next step came in.

where the loop actually became music was in audacity. first i made the drone following this tutorial. i hate its mocking tone but i can't deny it was useful. in short, i imported the darkplaces quake engine exe as raw data, paulstretched the shit out of it, trimmed down to ~15 minutes and reverbed. probably pitch shifted too. with it as a base, i did the same thing to my m01dboxed loop, to a less extreme extent. each little loop was now two-ish minutes long, and they're on two tracks so i can overlap the ends and make the looping less abrupt / mechanical. the last one is reversed too. i think the final result is a pretty decent soundscape to fill the vn, even if not really something that can stand up for itself. so, perfectly adequate for a first try!

the menu track is iirc just another segment of the darkplaces drone. i cut a part that had a somewhat sine wavey shape, and it's pretty short because you won't ever listen to it for long, and because of its nature you won't really notice it looping anyway. i did what i could to have the transition between menu and game music less jarring, but i think it'd be worth experimenting with the drone and melody layering being done in-engine, so the drone would play seamlessly the whole time, with the melody layered while actually playing. something to keep in mind.

in short! this was actually pretty damn easy and you better watch out for now i can make so much bad, perchance mid, dark ambient... i probably won't! but who knows! i will say i have made a touhou 07 remix just because using the exe for the drone was a cute idea. not posting it though. it's like a sketch.

everything else

anyway, the rest of the vn went as you'd expect. as a mood piece made on a whim, the process was rather unstructured and unplanned and a little more art led than with bertha (which followed a pretty expected outline → script → art, for the most part); or maybe more of an ourobouros. so i didn't have everything written at the start, and i hadn't even really written the hunger route before making cgs for it. oh, and as a fun fact, the hunger route is me finally getting to write about something i've been vaguely steeping since january — not the ideal form yet, but it's a sexy form, which is good enough.

in fact, i guess the whole thing is kinda feeding off my january — two cgs are based on photos i took on new year's eve / day, when my friends and i spent all night on the beach. i don't really view a new year as particularly special, but it was a really nice and beautiful night. idk i fucking love the night and the night sky!

erotic art

by the way, sex manuals are kinda slept on for pose reference. like. there's so few resources for learning erotic art out there it's crazy, and i've never heard that brought up, but i think they're more pleasant than pornpics dot com (which is supremely sterile and unsexy to browse imo). and for this vn i conveniently remembered wet, which is all about sex and water, particularly at the beach. it's on a collection i stumbled upon some time ago called folkscanomy: erotica and sexuality, which has some really shit metadata and not really a ton of interesting things but is rather useful to keep in mind and you don't even need to borrow the books to view them. i'd like to build a little library of ero reference eventually. yall know i take porn very seriously (thanks to people like amelie doree and bigg and just being on cohost — if you can openly talk about a subject instead of fearing a ban, discussion becomes much more productive!).

i also see a lot of potential in photography guides: boudoir, glamour and nude all seem useful for ways to think about composition, posing, colors etc. i haven't been able to find anything about more overt pornography (save for how to be an internet pornographer, which isn't very helpful or illustrated at all) which is unsurprising but still disappointing. it'd make for a very interesting read at the very least: i'm quite curious about the people working behind the camera.

closing thoughts

yeah i think that's all about the vn! well, i also answered an ask on tumblr about some of the influences behind it, if you wanna read more of my yapping. i'm quite happy with it and had a great time painting some dark dark beaches. i'm considering making a small and silly artbook companion too, i think it'd be fun. i think my narrative art tends to get pretty serious in tone (which might be a consequence of my pretty terse writing style), and while this also touches on some darker moods it's still very much lighthearted to me.

media

games

cage of roses (demo) (2025): ehhh well it is a lesbian vampire vn so i must look at it. but i found myself vaguely bored? not to mention it does nawt look 19th century and i'm annoying about that (and i get it! i made a historical vn, i know drawing historical accuracy isn't easy!), and there isn't any mistique concerning the fact magdalena is a vampire. which... of course the reader knows they're getting into a vampire story because that's the draw but this castlevania mindspace doesn't interest me much. idk i just wasn't hooked, though vampire yuri eroge isn't a vast niche — vndb gives me three results for "lesbian sex only" + "vampire", and one of those is mine — so i will be playing it when there's a sale.
the vampire's visitor (2022)
it gets so lonely here (2023): played the first part / romance and honestly i might not like ebi-hime's writing. it's a shame but i just got kinda bored. SAD, i love the style.
a summer's end — hong kong 1986 (2020): wooo finally getting to it.
concrete tremor (2023)
star of providence (2017): oh comfy. the game plays really nicely and isn't as hard as i feared. i'm still bad at vidyagames but it's a chill experience.
angel at dusk (2024): this game is so kind... arcade very hard is a power fantasy — it's just tailored to make you feel badass, very very generous with resource replenishment, and there's a stage select; greatest challenge often is reading the screen honestly (this game gets cluttered as hell; seeing your angel get huge is very cool but it's better to play with the miniature mode). i think having both a regular arcade mode and one with upgrades is pretty good, especially because that track is still composed of fixed stages instead of a freak roguelike fusion or something. it maeks the grindy elements of the game feel less so, because shmups are a genre where you're "supposed" to replay for better scores and higher difficulty. yeag, took me a while to decide to cave and buy this but it's a nice little shmup, it suits me.
palm cracker (2025): yeah it's a fun little free puzzle, very flash game core. i do think it's a bit of a shame that you can't really complete it without external help for one of the puzzles (well, unless you know princess diana's death date off the top of your head, which i very much don't [well, technically you can also do the math if you're a freak, but with leap years and stuff i really don't wanna think about this]) but i mean. it's well done and i like cryptography.
ligeia (2024): part of the locally sourced anthology i: space atlas, and part of the reason why i bought in the first place (the other being don't sing me the blues, please, sing me a BRIGHT RED SONG OF LOVE). it's nice, i think a succesful iron lung like (words that feel yucky to say but we both know are the truth...). i wish it had more meat to it, because the visuals and gameplay are very very good, but it ends before it actually gets really going with the tension.
on mount ségou (2023)
panthalassa (demo) (2025): rubbing my hands together most nefariously. welcome back manglepaw. well, the only similarity is being point-and-click games with weird 3d aesthetics but i think there's not enough of those! and this one has robots! underwater! awesome demo, but i'm kinda miffed i solved the puzzle by accident. i think i understood the mechanic but i couldn't spawn wisened, so i don't think i actually did. i also lowkey wish the game was using pre-rendered 3d graphics. the physics and movement and everything is really really nice and pretty but my laptop definitely can't take this kind of stuff too well, i had some intense frame drops here and there. not something that gets in the way of point-and-clicking, but it makes me sad to realize this guy has entered middle age. anyway, play the demo and wishlist the game okay?
don't sing me the blues, please, sing me a BRIGHT RED SONG OF LOVE (2024): SICKOS YES. this is the main reason i got the anthology, i've been eyeing this game for ages. i really liked it but aw man i wish this game were longer and/or more challenging, because it's got a very strong backbone to it! it'd be awesome if it really required you to plan things out and make more use of the loop structure. you get 15 minutes before the boss shows up, and i think that's too long! i had time to grab every item / visit every room with a minute to spare, without even planning anything. and yes, it was in part because i'd played before and knew where to take detours instead of engaging enemies (the timer still runs while in combat), but i think i'd rather be forced to choose which items to prioritize, in particular because you can change your starting item if you know what to type in. idk i think it's solidly in the void stranger cluster in a good way (look i disliked that game but it's not something to be dismissed either)
ena: dream bbq (2025): you must be tired of hearing this by now but my laptop did not appreciate this game. an absolute shame because it looks awesome. the animations are all top tier, and i really liked the voice acting as well (ena's voices are a treat). howeverr i got stuck at a platforming section (likely place for me to be), so i couldn't get to the end.

movies and series

the girl with the needle (2024): i was initially not sure how this slid under my radar until oscar season, but upon watching and discovering it's actually not psychological horror at all it became clearer. it's not a bad movie, in fact it's quite good and well shot, but it's 100% historical drama, why it's listed as horror in wikipedia is beyond me.
the brutalist (2024): well. enjoyable movie but it's not really my thing and i'm not sure i'm fully picking up what it's putting down. i think its nods to zionism were not a good look.
all the boys love mandy lane (2006): damn this could have been incisive feminist critique because genuinely other than a slasher it's mandy going through psychological torture. but it was made by a man in the 2000s. nevertheless it's a solidly made horror movie. horror movies with questionable politics are a dime a dozen, at least this one isn't a pain to watch yknow, actively compelling even. i liked it despite its shortcomings. we still have jennifer's body.
fire of love (2022): oughhhh ok i'm ashamed to say i've been meaning to watch this movie since it came out, i remember we almost did once at a friend's house (iirc this was when we watched marte um instead — didn't love it [family drama, we've talked about this], my friends cried). but it just didn't happen and dear goddddd this movie is gorgeous. awesome stuff. i am horny for volcanoes now.
mickey 17 (2025): really fun movie! i like dark comedies, casting is pitch perfect, the aliens are so cutes. it's not deep satire or anything, and definitely not Thinky Scifi but it's rock solid. imo it's in that arrival zone despite the tone being very very different, and better because it's not weirdly sinophobic. always glad i watched that movie before reading stories of your life because i'd be so fucking mad to see a movie that specifically adds in things that make the story worse.
white wall (2020): this series has been in my watchlist for ages and i have no idea how i found it. watched the first episode, fine enough but you don't really see the damn premise on it -_-. i'll get back to it eventually.
the apprentice (2024): quite good! had fun. sebastian stan is really good.
the rehearsal (2022-): amazing series, i'm hyped for season 2... really wonder what it'll be like. it's not something i expected to get another season, i think it works really well on its own.
bocchi the rock (2022-): idem about s2 hype omg. finally finishing it, so fucking awesome. guys i'm sure i'm neurotypical.
westworld (2016-2022): don't get scared i had my fill with s1 and won't watch the objectively bad ones (just the mid one). it's fun enough for the most part but it's soooo fucking stupid. sometimes i was stopped dead in the tracks by realizing just how much of a videogames piece of media it is. the inspo is just crazy visible, and that's not really a problem but in this case it's just kinda lame. damn dude i too played skyrim. i think it's particularly not my thing with william and logan. i mean nuance and all but is logan truly unjustified in treating the theme park as a sandbox? not that his insistence in violence isn't fucked but also it's not that deep idk. it's easy for the series to treat this as a moral question because we as the viewers know the hosts can remember what's happened to them, but the characters don't know that, they treat the park as a game because that's what it is to them. idk just pisses me off a little that we spend time on that shit when we could be seeing dolores' lesbian awakening (also on that note the series is fucked about male bi and homosexuality, honestly sex in general — i find it curious and strange [read: not at all] how much the series talks about fucking hosts and will at all times show nudity and sex and brothels but ☝️ only as some sort of deep depravity), or having any characterization at all for female characters, for that matter. oh and don't even get me started on the fucking twists and reveals dear god. idgaf he was just one of the producers we need to kill jj abrams anyway. see also #westposting on tumblr for more analysis, mid scifi really grinds my gears.
westworld (1973): the secret eleventh episode and it's going for a very different thing but it works so much better. in no small part because it actually depicts some of the minutiae of running the park, which the series somehow doesn't find the time to do in its ten hours. read the westposting tag for more on this too.
inception (2010): i watched it ✋⛓️‍💥🤚 !! i don't think i quite reached ten years with it on my watchlist, but it has been languishing there since high school. and yeah it's good, i have no doubt nolan is a strong director, i still wanna watch interstellar at some point, but not sure i have more to say than that. it feels stupid to call this movie unremarkable but i do think it hits harder when you're 15 and getting into Cinema for the first time. i missed the window. well at least i watched donnie darko back then. also why is the most well known movies always have the most drifty subtitles.
the spider labyrinth (1988): i love adding things to my watchlist and then forgetting the context, it's like my own personal weird dvd shop. well, it's an italian horror movie from the 80s and the stop motion spiders are very cute. a couple pretty good metaphorical labyrinths. overall pretty decent.
batman begins (2005): does every nolan movie have fucked subtitles. i guess stremio is having issues with opensubtitles actually, couldn't troubleshoot that -_- anyway it's been ages since i watched the dark knight trilogy and idk man. this movie in particular i think has it rough because i think origin stories are kinda dull. i think it's still a good movie, in the same way inception is, though with a couple of weird issues here and there (couldn't they make a psa for people to cover their nose and mouth... i think it'd at least help a little with the poison gas). and i like christian bale.
el jockey (2024): ooooh really liked it! it's really stylish and quite off kilter throughout, really my style of movie. it's pretty chewy. find it on ok.ru btw.
the stepford wives (1975): oh there's such a sense of dread permeating this movie. i mean, it's horror about misogynistic violence, that's what they're always like. i didn't know the book this is based on is by the same author of rosemary's baby (a movie i haven't watched yet but is fairly high priority, and higher now) — ironically a man, as are the director and writer of the movie. i think they mostly did a good job but the climax relies on a very contrived moment where joanna just stands there inexplicably. overall i think the ending sequence just doesn't work very well.

also severance season 2... woag... well. finale wasn't my fav episode, i think it's not really what i love the series for (the patient needs people in business clothes standing around and talking to live — and that's not all, i'll get to it) but it was a good season for a really good series. i liked it! i miss them already... however ☝️ i think this is a very middle sibling season in some regards. i'm not gonna say it got dumbed down for a general audience but it feels like a very tidy ending that's also very much a cliffhanger for season 3, in a way i don't think the first season was? am i making sense. idk man i think my friend is right; succession is the better of the duo, and possibly the best of the decade for now. also ngl: i kinda wish they killed mark off, because earlier on the season i was very very much of the thought "mark isn't the main character of this world, he's just the guy we follow", but despite the time devoted for side characters like milchick and cobel and outies irving and dylan (and natalie. TO ME) they're definitely centering mark more and too much in a way i really don't care much for, especially as a mark/helly hater sorry their relationship feels like fanfic and helly is so much more compelling outside of it. like wow the series curtailing her agency much like helena does, awesome metafiction everyone.

books and manga

hav (jan morris): this book felt like purgatory i'm sad to say. like getting some sort of dental procedure done, where you're not in pain but it's just so so boring and you're there with your mouth open and that little tube sucking your saliva out and it's taking forever and man you could be doing so many things but here you are. as i said in my mid-book review, orientalist as hell, and while it's less boring in the second part, that's because it becomes more traditional fiction with characters and a storyline in a way, which is a bit of a bummer. idk, it took me so long and i didn't really enjoy any of the two weeks (!) i spent in this book. it's like. 2.5 stars but uh yeah. idkkkk.
enemy feminisms: terfs, policewomen, and girlbosses against liberation (sophie lewis): woo have been anticipating this book and it did not disappoint. well except for the anglo focus obviously but that's annoyingly par for the course with the way i tend to get book reccs. anyhow, i think it's really important to dissect how feminism does not imply left wing or revolutionary tendencies. the true scotsman fallacy and all that. quite liked it.
all the hearts you eat (hailey piper): ough... made for me... it's a lesbian vampire book but also so much more... i should give it a proper review on the lez v corner.
biomega (tsutomu nihei): idk man... idk...
a paixão segundo g.h. (clarice lispector): oughh so so well written, i fucking love her repetition, but i read it at a bad time because it's a slow read and i started it right alongside making the game and this is something to read in one or two deranged sittings like i did exhalation during a blackout.

started on feminism against cisness (ed. emma heaney) and will probably read abara as my next tsutomu nihei manga.

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