index
april 2025
hi! as i'm posting this it's yet another birthday... i've been treating this one a little like a second new years, but it's only for silly low stakes things like watching movies i don't wanna keep in my watchlist (the nolan watchaton continues...). still, glad to still be alive and kicking and so on. i've had a pretty good time this month actually, i saw machine girl live (!!!), i hung out with friends, met new people, watched good movies and played good games, painted a fair bit, i'm writing a new short story.
new on the site: is this the month of the blogger.
- i've finished dataplankton, which is to say i've done the decent thing and buried its rotting corpse. go read it, it's not long and has been stuck "in-progress" for two years. it deserves a proper sendoff.
- ultros (2024) review for the haters.
- blood countess (1992) for the lezv heads.
- um post sobre revistas de animanga na virada do milênio, raro post em português, which you can probably put through google translate and have reasonable results (it's about turn of the millenium animanga magazines i found on the internet archive).
and for links:
art
i remain firmly in charcoal central! i love itttt i need to go bigger and cram more detail but these 15x20 canvases are SO quick to bang out which is how i like to work...
btw the white details on these are tailor's chalk because my white comte pencil is lost to the sands of time (but i'm dead sure it's still around somewhere despite ten-ish years and three moves) and i get very lazy about buying materials like these... if i can't get something locally i'll put it off forever.
and foddart:
i also did the badges for the agents: recon event. click to see all seven, these are just my faves ^_^
i feel this one (the sketchpage) is a bit more suggestive
and a few kneesocks... as i wrote on tumblr, stocking is a little out of character here but i needed to draw the horn grab so bad. i really like her idk what to say. her glasses swag. i think she got really bayonetta-esque on the sketchpage which is fun (more so initially when i forgor and made her brunette since i didn't use a reference at all).
media
games
- eider cake (2024): cute!
- the children of clay (2025): wooo awesome.
- type help (2025): just a fucking awesome mystery game. it really pulls off a return of the obra dinn in pure text, it's really well made.
- her story (2025): took me far too long to play this... i bought the game months ago. it's really good but i can't help comparing it to immortality, which is just much more mature (as in, made by a storyteller that's better at what he's doing etc etc). i like the visual "connections" in that game a bit better too, as well as the story being more my thing. but this isn't about immortality! her story is good! a tight 3-ish hours, good acting, nice presentation, though i found myself not really revisiting clips or using the tags, instead relying on writing possible future searches on my sketchbook and sometimes browsing the history. it's a good afternoon game.
- how a body sounds (2025): so so cool... i like it when a game's multiple endings are actually linear, though i found the last one to be a little weak so it overstayed its welcome a little bit. still a very good game, cool visual style too.
- trip world (1991): stumbled across this short little guy on tumblr. it's got really cute art and nice music, it's like a walking sim tbh. and like that's probably because it's a baby game for babies but consider: i'm really not joking when i say platformers wall me badly, particularly the genre's combat conventions (have i told yall about when i played super mario odyssey at a friend's and forgot you have to step on goombas?). i save scummed my way through this, but it'd be fun to work up to a 1cc honestly (it's under 20 minutes). overall just something that feels like it belongs to a lineage of games i don't see around much, but wish i did.
- ultros (2024): i'd checked the demo out last year and was just waiting for the right sale and moment. game's really well optimized, which makes me even madder at nine sols running like shit when it's quite literally the same thing as far as visuals go. ended up with a full length review for it.
- mooncat (ufo 50) (2024): genuine masterpiece i'm not joking no hyperbole no nothing. this should be a standalone game so everyone in the world had the opportunity to try it (also to give people a level editor, i want to see what the kaizo freaks do with this). far from relying just on the quirky controls to be a gimmicky but otherwise stale game, mooncat's esoteric movement is part of what makes it a puzzle (though you do get used to it faster than you realize). the game is less about taking your weird guy through gorgeous levels while listening to BANGER music (and fighting the controls), and more about coming to understand its quirks (the routing! listen to me: the multiple routes within individual levels! the secrets in plain sight you can only discover by accident / trial and error!). it questions platformer conventions while still being a really cool platformer, and it's just an absolutely incredible experience. truly genius shit and really fun. it made me want to master it, and seeing a new level was always exciting, and this isn't even a genre i like. i do think (and hope!) we'll see more indie games inspired by this design philosophy in the next few years. someone port this to the nintendo ds.
- ...and the mooncats (2015): the predecessor, and it's really tiny (3 levels and a boss) with much simpler movement but you can see the strong conceptual bones. it's neat.
- metal garden (2025): two bangers back to back. this game is my hole it was made for me. there's even a pure exploration mode: and the exploration here is truly top tier, and the movement is perfectly smooth so it feels good as hell to walk around. it really really nails the mood down, i absolutely love the ps2 era look and the dark and desaturated color palette. the map feels HUGE but not bloated: the game is a tight 2.5-3 hours and i found myself wishing it were longer just so i could poke around more (but it's wise to keep it trim 🙂↕️). take a lazy sunday afternoon to play this game (it's on itch and steam), and don't forget to raise the music volume: the default of 50% is criminal, the soundtrack perfectly complements the environments.
- so i bought a little chainsaw (2024)
- divers (ufo 50) (2024): i found it too grindy for my tastes but damn between this and mooncat they really mastered swimming controls. it feels so nice and natural. and i like the map, i really love the sprites (the asset reuse is cute too). but i did not love playing it, due to the aforementioned grind. exploration was delicious though, and the willingness to leave so much unexplained is everything to me. the reddit types just don't appreciate leaving the green cave as an eternal mystery. in fact, that's the thing about ufo 50. the meta story is cool, don't get me wrong, but it brings out the worst in the lore freaks and i'm tired of lore freaks. not to be an old man screaming at cloud but it's all youtube's fault. "what does this mean and how does this all tie together with the other games?" idk man maybe they were just adding fun easter eggs and mysteries that make the world seem bigger, especially fitting for the depths of the ocean. live a little.
- night manor (ufo 50) (2024): it's a nice point and click with no moon logic and minimal pixel hunting (i think most interactables stand out pretty well, but i missed a couple here and there and had to use a walkthrough). i really like how your cursor shakes when you encounter the killer.
- a palimpsest (2025): my friend's anti-game! it looks slick as hell, and generative art is always fun...
- what remains of edith finch (2017): um can i say something. played for an hour and found that kinda mid... it's just slow enough to piss me off, despite being fairly interesting it's also exactly the type of shit that tires me a bit... i mean of course the game's premise is family stuff but idk...
- spider land (2025)
- 10s forever (demo) (2025): ok so i actually could not figure the controls of this game out lmao kicked my ass. but figured i'd share because it looks very cool. worth keeping an eye on yknow.
- petra-2000 (2025): ohh nice! this and the next billion games are all from the discmaster jam, which i didn't join but looked like great fun.
- archaeos (2025): really really neat, and the castle of crossed destinies is an underrated calvino book.
- anglesoft's c2 prototype (2025): a second pda puzzle game has hit the twin towers. this was quite fun, a little tricky.
- the compunaut & the meaning of life (2025): really cool art direction, though the camera sensitivity almost made me queasy. think it'd be better as a platformer than as a fps.
- pillars of babel (2025): fuck me this looks so so cool but i swear i could not get past the second jump.
- cyberspace defender (2025): omg a dreamwild-like. couldn't really play it but it does look neat.
- cloud storage botanical station (2025): this one's by loren over at ribo.zone. lovely lovely atmosphere, very cute little scene with lots of attention to detail. very nice hanging out in there.
- ゲイ無関係: kidnapping a maid has nothing to do with being gay!! (2025): the concept of scavenging cgs from another game via an archived hentai compilation cd is really cool. the vn itself is not really my thing but pretty fun regardless.
- video hunting specimen (2025): this jam made for some really interesting visuals!
- to perdition (2025): really really fascinating little thing, and i don't think it was meant to be? now, this sounds kinda mean, but i truly do love the insane thing this turned out to be. the generated dungeons are completely alien: the textures are odd, the architecture is nonsensical, the scale is bizarre, sound effects play at the wrong times. you can make spatially defying jumps. not a single enemy spawns. i encountered a glitch where a default capsule spawned at the hub and mirrored my movement. this is truly really special, i had to record some of it.
- mazeumdiscmaster (2025): look when it comes to jam games i really try my best to not just have negative things to say. so: i really wanted to check this out further because it seems like a very cool walking sim and all, but i could not see shit. it's just so fucking dark. and not being able to look up or down makes me kinda queasy.
- the corpse of miriam oliver (2025): neat little thing, i wish the picross was a little more complex but that's ok. music is harsh though.
- qualia (2025): i played this demo during next fest and it didn't run on linux but the full thing does. anyway i didn't like the demo but felt the full thing could be more substantial but nah it's not. it seems to have 6 endings and i got two before bouncing because it's just... i don't much care about oo what if you didn't know you were a robot and so on. maybe some people will connect with this, i didn't.
also finallyyyy cleared perfect cherry blossom. i've not been a diligent grinder, if the game stats are accurate i cleared it in under 8 hours... across two years. yeah. i do love it, feels nice to have conquered yuyuko (and nicer to have her stage unlocked for practice!), and my mindset has changed a lot while playing too — not feeling desperate and lost means i can ditch reimu a and score higher for some extends. working on a 1cc now. a single touhou game can feed a grown adult for years. i find the predictability comforting. but i've also poked at mountain of faith (that's #10, from 2007), which is kinda brutal with its lives — which i think can be good to train me to bomb more. though the power-bomb system makes me so greedy. and i'll definitely be playing fossilized wonders once the demo drops (and the full game too ofc).
i've also played more angel at dusk and for a little addition / change to my review, i do think the chronicle mode is a neat concept and well executed but it's definitely not for me, or at least not for me right now, because it's both kinda unpredictable (in that there are so many stages you won't really keep track in your head of what is what, and you'll see new stages often as you work across the tree) and repetitive (in that you need to replay stages a lot so you can level up at least a little bit before tackling stuff you haven't completed yet, and bosses repeat so much). so i think it kinda sucks that you have to complete it to unlock the third arcade track, and i kinda gave up on that for the time being.
movies and series
- the dark knight (2008): now this is a batman movie. i mean, not really my thing, i don't really care for action movies, but it's a damn good superhero movie and without setting up backstories it just flows, as much as a two and a half hour movie can. was good then, is good now, dc has been trying to reach this high ever since. also god... heath ledger... ohh also i should do this: current nolan women count is 1 alive / 1 dead in-movie / 1 pre-dead wife. two if you count bruce's mom but i'm only keeping track of major characters (not that there are many others lmao).
- resident evil (2002): ughh i neeeeed one of these 90s / 2000s survival horror tall boots fr. i like alice and rain and the movie is badass campy fun (real cool ost), much like the silent hill movie. i think it's better than that one because the resi games have a campier baseline, plus it's shorter (honestly could be more so, it feels padded here and there with flashbacks and slowmos). cgi equally bad though.
- the black glove (1996): watch this short nowwwww (heads up: it is bdsm porn. it's on letterboxd though). my art has got to get sexier fr, this is the type of shit i'm trying to do. the monochrome is perfectly stylized, and the near complete silence is such a good choice, even as i'd be tempted to slap some dark ambient on it. and of course a really good example of non-genital erotics. genuinely really good stuff, watched it with hands behind my back like in a museum.
- money shot: the pornhub story (2023): really fucking dry doc ngl. i think it lacks an actual pov and it certainly lacks teeth, which i can't say i didn't expect.
- la región salvaje (2016): oh wow i went into this one mostly blind, just knowing it was scifi horror, and was not expecting such a grounded drama for most of the runtime... inch resting i'll say that. you know that one post where the person watched a drama thinking it was shin godzilla and then went "damn and they'll have to deal with godzilla eventually"? in some ways think this is what that movie would feel like. i do wish the alien was practical instead of cg, possession really spoiled me when it comes to freaky creatures that give women much more pleasure a man ever could. anyway. in the end i didn't like it very much, i don't think it quite gels together well. appreciate the attempt nevertheless.
- poltergeist (1982): huh can you believe i'd never watched this. i remember a teacher showing us clips from poltergeist iii back in high school when i was a scaredy cat and then i never really thought of the series. from the beginning there's something really spielberg to it, despite him not directing, only writing. i can't quite put my finger on it, i haven't watched much of his work but something about the characters and dynamics and even the score is just sooo him — i think he has a bit of a children's movie touch (yes, even jaws). i need to watch the tobe hooper movies on my watchlist, but it doesn't feel anything like the texas chain saw massacre. anyway movie's kinda boring ngl. uninteresting story, too many effects that don't hold up, and it overstays its welcome by a solid half hour. it's a bit of an unbearable screamfest at times too. but it's so fun that the spirit world (?) is some sort of meat dimension with a huge dark souls skeleton in it.
- chungking express (1994): wow they weren't lying this movie's good. wong kar wai's style suits me perfectly i think... i really like it when a movie doesn't attempt to hide that it is one. also fun fact they drink sol in this (... or maybe in the other?) which is a beer i'd assumed was a actually a brazilian beer so it jumpscared me a bit. it tastes like watered down corona (if that's even possible!!) btw i lowkey hate it (← for those unaware i am a bit of a beer guy; i like whitbiers and stouts).
- in the mood for love (2000): aw yeah baby i went to a double feature. i really really loved this movie and felt very normal throughout. unrealized and unresolved romantic and erotic tension just for me yum!
- the dark knight rises (2012): someone needs to put chris bale in a western to really make use of his facial hair. anyway this movie is crazy ideologically ngl. like jesus so the gotham police force has balooned and the jails are stuffed full and this is somehow a positive. that's all done in the name of harvey dent, a man we the audience know is a villain, textually. are we not addressing the irony here. because idk man i personally think killing cops by burying them alive in a sewer is awesome. "they're hunting down cops like dogs" yayy! anyway jonathan crane is sooo cunty here, cillian murphy slays in this role. nolan women count is 2 alive / 2 dead in-movie / 1 pre-dead wife. no bechdel test passed and catwoman doesn't have a whip (her suit is real boring too — kravitz's might be my favorite even as i do love pfeiffer's iconic look) so this is the most lesbophobic movie i've watched this year.
- a primeira vez do cinema brasileiro (2013): woah it's brazilian inside deep throat (2005)... documentary about our very first theatrically released pornographic movie, coisas eróticas (1981) (which i'm not listing individually but have in fact watched and is terribly boring). ended up here while researching pornochanchadas (for the most part, from what i've gathered, not actually explicit at all, but often selling themselves as racier than they actually were — i think the cinema em close-up magazine prolly captures the tone well [btw the site is borked and images only load occasionally?]) and adult movie theaters (i was curious about the contemporary culture when it came to watching these movies and going to these places back then, and along the way learned a fair bit about gay cruising in the 2000s and early 2010s). uhh there's a transmisogyny jumpscare (there has been at least one in nearly every article i read too). but otherwise it's a fairly interesting look into the production, if rather bloated and shallow — it wastes a lot of time with clips of the movie and for some unexplicable reason recreates one of the scenes with contemporary actors and techniques. could we not have gotten more historical context instead.
- interstellar (2014): ugh what do you want me to say. i was warned i'd hate the family drama aspect (not only that, my friend whose favorite movies include aftersun said it was the worst part of the movie) and i really really did. i think the movie's kinda stupid with the time relativity thing, and i think i felt this way because it was so intrinsically tied to the family drama aspect, or maybe because the scale was just so Epic that i couldn't truly grasp the stakes. i don't know, it feels fake deep in a way, sorry. but i do like the robots, both design and voice acting, so i'll give it that. now onto the relevant matters: +1 dead wife. man if i were nolan's wife i'd be scared af. nolan women count is 4.5 alive / 2 dead in-movie / 1 pre-dead wife (pre-dead wife doesn't appear so she's not counted; i hesitate to count lois as a full character but don't wanna completely dismiss her either. in any case average w/m remains under 2 and none of them treated well except maybe inception's ariadne. and i do think if nolan saw a black woman he would die on the spot or something).
- persona (1966): i mean. holy shit. gotta revisit this one every five years or so tbh. it's really fucking good. wonder how many letterboxd funnyman reviews compare it to the lighthouse (2019).
- the rehearsal (2022-): wooo season 2 babey.
- cube (1997): in some ways such a saw v coded movie. awful awful autistic caricature. only character of color is a violent cop. this movie's got it all huh. i think it had some nice things going for it in theory, but the cold open might be the strongest part of the movie tbh. it's very low on horror, i think it has a certain sessão da tarde je ne sais quoi. it's mid.
- panty & stocking with gaterbelt (2010): finished it after having dropped it halfway through. a mixed feelings anime if there ever was one, though i overall liked it, it's good ecchi, i love the girlies. i hope s2 / nu-psg does better, particularly when it comes to the racism. also i think it's so interesting that the ending seems to be a point of contention... or at least to have been back in the ancient days of two thousand and ten. i think it's entirely tonally appropriate to have a post-credits twisty cliffhanger and no actual season two, and i hope it goes unaddressed on nu-psg, or like, just alluded to in jokes.
- sinners (2025): ermmm... so. i didn't love it. i think it's overall good and well made and the soundtrack slaps and i'm not even gonna call it competent which is how you know i'm genuine about its quality — there is some good shit in there! — but there's also something off about it that inclined me to call it mid, which is also unfair. i think it's both a matter of taste and a matter of the director's inexperience with the genre. it's very much on the action horror side of things which i don't really like and muddies the theme. and it does not like women — classic defined by their relationships to men shit. come on.
books and manga
- abara (tsutomu nihei): liked this one better than biomega. the smaller cast and tighter focus works well, and of course the art is awesome. really clear how it influenced chainsaw man, that's pretty cool too.
- feminism against cisness (ed. emma heaney): i don't knowwww i need to reread this eventually... essay anthologies are really not my thing.
- jagannath (karin tidbeck): oooo save me karin tidbeck... really good collection, favorites were (predictably) pyret and jagannath. who is arvid pekon? and rebecka are also great — i like their worldbuilding through implication. idk how to explain it, but it works very well. they're definitely an author to keep an eye on!
- the shaman, the outsider, and the diet of worms (stanley w. baxton): yeah this is awesome, it's a solid novella, i read it in one sitting. in the end i did like the wiki and the foreword (and the postmortem) the most, but that's because i'm a paratext freak.
now reading foucault's pendulum. sniles sneetly. book's good.
smell ya later :)
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