october 2025

hallowed be thy ween! how are we doing in this fine october. i don't think i have much to say. not much has happened. nothing usually does. i did see jeff mills live and that was absolutely fucking incredible though. and i got an extremely cute btssb babydoll jsk replica. now the replica discourse is kinda fraught but getting a (most likely handmade) quality replica secondhand beats getting a new taobao dress shipped halfway across the globe no matter how you slice it.

new project: the zine for a machine walks on the beach at night is ~~exorcised~~ done! read for free here on the website or get the printable pdf for $3+ over on itch.io (it's mostly as a thanks for donating ^_^). feels good to have this done... it look so long for so so little (compared to my usual bloggy word counts) because there were a lot of threads i wanted to follow but wasn't too sure how... i think that because this was such a fast game to make i didn't have the time to "process" some of it while making it, if that makes sense. like i never really got to talk about its themes and stuff. dunno — this zine could have been a bunch of inpromptu tumblr posts if i'd worked on it for a month instead of a week.

half-life, architecture, and anime girls. yayyy. in love with mistake of pythagoras holy shit.

art

my friends and i experimented with cyanotype, which was fun more than it was productive. there's a learning curve lmao. i can't really scan them and they're annoying to photograph. but the shade of blue is very pretty and we got some neat effects.

i also drew one (1) secret little thang... i'll post once the thing it's for comes out in december ^_^

media

games

rain world (2017): oughhh good game!! the mix of stable architecture with dynamic fauna feels so good to me, and it really does feel like you're outsmarting the creatures and not just learning patterns like a stealth game. also needless to say megastructures are sexyyyyy. i played monk first, and i loved how much it lets you play evasively; "combat" scares the shit out of me in this game, scug is so squishy... but i gotta git gud to play hunter and artificer... gourmand wasn't too too bad but i could feel the game expected me to be willing to be much more aggressive and i'm really not...
white noise protocol (2025): the multiplayer without any online connection thing was what really caught my eye, and it was really interesting. i played supervisor, which kinda felt like iron lung with a broken gps, but ultimately we succeeded. i do think it's kind of a shame there's no closure on the supervisor's side of things, but it's a 48h jam game so whatever. anyway i like the outside of a game being part of it...
blink (2022): i like being a devil's advocate but i'll be honest the qr codes are so unneccesary... the game's pretty neat but fumbling to grab my phone and turn on the camera to scan stuff was just a pain in the ass. i know i literally just said that i like the outside of a game being part of it but there's a fucking difference.
next fest demos: forgive me for not linking individually. i am lazyy and there's nothing super showstopping.
lovely lady rpg (2024): took me an entire year but i finally put my grubby hands on this game. it's really quite good. the often internecine tone isn't to everyone's taste, but i liked it and the inconsistent anachronisms. like. maybe the game would be "objectively better" or more impactful if it had disco elysium's robust worldbuilding and beautiful prose, but i liked seeing the edges, they kinda make the game more personal in spite of the ways they can mask sincerity. of course i'd have liked a version of this game that's entirely sincere and vulnerable, but i don't think it's written in the "if i am candid about how i feel i will die like john f kennedy" register by incompetence or accident, but because that's ghost's worldview, and the expected audience's... just my onion. also while i kinda wish there were ways to change your stats so they don't feel like vestigial organs, it really doesn't matter much; it puts the game solidly in visual novel territory which is perfectly fine by me.
checkmage! (demo) (2025): what a cute little game. it's pretty similar to the pokemon tcg games on the gameboy, which i really like. fucked up chess is always neat too.
byte (demo) (2025): oof ouch so hard on my eyes. and laptop — i was gonna power through despite the headache risk but the game just froze... sad, it looks very very compelling.

erohorror vn jam

listing separately for organization... here's the entries on itch; some of them are also hosted on fisher's website. and a reminder that my entry is four fangs bite into her tender flesh, if you haven't played it yet ^_^

midnight prayer: i don't like being harsh with jam games so i'll just say i didn't like it (both the general story and the choices themselves [being able to choose eg. whether protag succumbs to temptation or just says 'nah' simply kills tension and horror]) and leave it at that.
orangepeel, onionskin: what an absolutely stunningggg vn. beautiful art and presentation and music and story. dark and uncomfortable and erotic tension that feels very natural. mwahhhh. read this one.

i've got several more to play. hope they don't go the toxic yuri route and rot on my desktop...

movies and series

boogie nights (1997): this is a very hard movie to take seriously because i simply cannot see michael wahlberg catching anyone's eye. kinda makes the whole film kinda feel like when your friend has a crush on someone utterly mid (dicaprio was the original actor choice for this role which makes a fair bit more sense. joaquin phoenix would be inch resting too. also speaking of casts to be, gwyneth paltrow and drew barrymore being considered for rollergirl is crazy because when i first saw her i was like "hmm is that...?". maybe they're all just blonde though). anyway the movie's pretty good but for the love of god i wish it were more interested in its women... i care them... shoutout to the surprise alfred molina appearance though yay.
the talented mr. ripley (1999): it was kind of a syncronicity moment; a few days after i read the book, looking at other films the boogie nights cast was in and seeing philip seymour hoffman was in this — which btw is another one dicaprio almost worked in. i love coincidences. anyway: dog no way they took out the gay subtext... while also keeping it in some very weird ways (why'd you add a brand new guy to have erotic tension with tom. and to wear a really good black turtleneck sweater i'd really like to own). in the same vein, i think it's crazy that the movie foreshadows tom's overtaking of dickie's identity in a comically heavy handed way, making it seem like it was his idea from the start, and then makes the murder accidental. strange strange adaptation, and i get why it'd streamline some stuff but then all its new additions are so out of place and just fuck things up. also it should end a solid ten minutes earlier.
weapons (2025): doing my horror fan homework despite really not liking barbarian (in part because i found out it was by the same director only after buffering the whole thing on stremio)... this is a fun enough movey but also ughh. justine not being a lesbian is crazyyy but honestly that's a first twenty minutes petty grievance. this movie is bad in the same ways barbarian is: setting up a female protagonist and dropping her as soon as he's able, unnecessary use of non linearity and multiple pov characters to facilitate dropping said female protagonist — wrecking the pace in the process —, thinking old women are sooo scary. to me it seems like cregger really wants to make some Elevated Horror (maybe he thinks he's ari aster) but he's just a less entertaining james wan. at least wan made saw. cregger could try making a saw-like; he's actually pretty good at gore. also one last thing: i'm talking out my ass because my stephen king experience is very narrow, but something about the story makes it feel like an adaptation of one of his lesser works. lmk if i'm correct or entirely off in my assumption.
willy's wonderland (2021): this movie's cinematography lies somewhere between high budget advertisement and music video. some of the most aggressive post processing i've seen in my life. those two things together land it squarely in fnaf fan film posted to youtube, and i'm 100% here for it. and needless to say nic cage is here. i love the exhausted action veteran energy he's bringing. he accepts every obstacle with the patience and resignation of a martyr saint. the whole cast is really good actually! i wishhh kathy (and her relationship to whatsername protag) was better written because her first 2 minutes on screen put in my mind she could be a really fun character in lesbian feminist hands (← i'm quite literally always saying this). is the movie good? not really, no. its main draw is too thin to really last 90 minutes. but give yourself a blunt and a beer and a bunch of people and that becomes an asset because you don't need to pay any attention whatsoever. and it is better than five nights at freddy's (2023).
one battle after another (2025): i will admit i was scared of the runtime (kill me take my cinephile badge whatever) but pta knows how to make a long movie. i've watched 120 minutes that felt longer. and this movie is GOOD. loved the performances, loved the story and the tension and the action, loved the score a lot.
queen of the damned (2002): it's time. i loathe this book and the movie doesn't have a good reputation. but my friend said it's fun-bad and aaliyah's akasha is gorgeous and the score is all nu metal and it's halloween month. the way it seems the journalists are so serious about his vampirism is so fucking funny. do they do this to ghost. anyway onto the movie proper: pisses me the fuck off how lestat's backstory was changed. where the fuck is gabrielle. where's nicki, where's lestat's bisexuality. where's magnus' suicide leaving lestat lost and lonely in his new life!! look. adaptations are complicated and i'd like to judge it on its own merits as a standalone movie (not that this approach would save it), but come the fuck on it just makes him so generic... anyway i already hate jesse the fuckass specialest redhead and it doesn't help that marguerite moreau is giving us absolutely nothing (i stg you'd think she's a vampire the way she's genuinely completely dead in every single scene) and her character's motivations are just not there at all. at least stuart townsend is hamming it up. did you know he was actually hired as aragorn in jackson's movies?? crazy. well the movie is bad but despite the heterosexuality akesha sucking lestat's blood to change (in the house of flies) goes hard it must be said.
le vourdalak (2023): this movie fuckssss. i love puppets i love theatrics i fucking love 16mm. if you wish you'd liked viy (1967) more, this is the movie for you. really good gloomy folk horror.
peter pan's neverland nightmare (2025): honestly? a very well made movie, especially for its budget, with genuinely good performances throughout. however ultimately forgettable in its competence. it doesn't use the peter pan gimmick yknow. i think it should have gone the nightmare on elm street route. yknow. neverland and dreams and all. instead we get inexplicable pennywise and joker vibes from peter. baffling stuff. not to mention the weird full frontal nudity moment where we see he has no genitals. what's up with that.
bliss (2017): this one's been on my watchlist for ages because it was in the lez-v media category on wikipedia but uhhh it's not a vampire movie at all, even if you stretch things reaaaally far into the realm of lesbophobic allegory, which i'm not inclined to do. i'd include bergman's persona in such a list first. in any case, the movie is a pretty good thriller but as soon as i saw the twist coming it just kinda deflated things somewhat... the aforementioned lesbophobia didn't help either.

books and manga

the starving saints (caitlin starling): ok let me be a pedant first: "fever dream of medieval horror" this is pseudomedieval fantasy and that's a meaningful difference. not a dig at the book (that will come later), but medieval horror is already hard enough to find without such dissolution. its religion isn't even pseudocatholic, it's just a trope-ish nothing, underexplored by all three of the pov characters not being religious (classic shit worldbuilding move). and when it comes to horror... it's complicated, because imo horror needs powerlessness and that is mostly lost towards the end. i was expecting a much slower burn, more gothic and subdued and mysterious instead of overt gore (which again, not an inherent problem because overt gore is fine and lovely). but at the same time i struggle to call the book fast paced, because it often feels like going in circles. i think a very weird part was treila leaving and immediately coming back; not because i didn't suspect she'd come back, but because i thought for sure she was Not in the "real world". would that be better for the book? maybe not. but a little more inspired than the plot cul-de-sac. also for a supposedly lesbian book we get a lot more sexual tension with a random ass male antagonist than any meaningful development of the relationships between the three protags. what are we doing. in short: i enjoyed this more than starling's other book i've read (the death of jane lawrence) but it suffers from similar problems of being too vibes based for what it wants to be. like i said on the review for that one, "it's ok for light reading", but there are books that are actually good for light reading. so.
the talented mr. ripley (patricia highsmith): liked it! though reading about 24 year olds with an unclear sense of purpose always gives me the heebie-jeebies. only tangentially related but i remember people saying saltburn was this book if it sucked and i get the character similarities but i think it's such a fundamentally different structure.
rakesfall (vajra chandrasekera): when i read the blurb for this one calling it an epic i'll be honest i just thought no wayy, this book is 300 pages long. well i ate those words right back up. dizzying. i loved it.
the black body in ecstasy: reading race, reading pornography (jennifer c. nash): some nice ideas in this book but it was a bit underwhelming. the focus on specific golden and silver age pornos felt too narrow to me.
you have beautiful eyes (moto hagio): oneshot. beautiful art as always.
hildegard of bingen's unknown language: an edition, translation, and discussion (sarah l. highley): i was afraid i'd be way over my head but the book is very straightforward and approachable. pretty neat stuff.
carnal resonance: affect and online pornography (susanna paasonen): hm idk. i think i didn't read this as closely as i should have. also it's definitely from a particular era... porn spam emails seem so quaint now.
the history of hentai manga (kimi rito): god i was warned the writing was bad but i need to emphasize: the writing is bad. i went in kinda thinking it was gonna be on the shallow end of pop historyish but it's more like a bad blog post. beyond the wordcraft itself being bad (it's so fucking repetitive — and i don't think it's being helped by the translation), it really lacks contextualization. i didn't expect the book to cover the entire history of japanese erotic art and media but i think an overview of hentai as a genre was warranted instead of starting off talking about boobs. idk i'm interested on the matters of readership and economics and legislation (censorship is often mentioned but not elaborated on) whether trends are aligned with adult video or not. i truly appreciate the dedication to specific tropes, but they feel detached.

not sure what i'll read next! fiction probably.

see you soon :3

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