pretty explicit
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hi everyone how are we? some exciting stuff on the blog this month!
new on the site: secret horses manifesto, which i made as an entry for the manifesto jam, but also posted as a marrow blog. related, the local ganbreeder image generation guide has been updated because my friend made a nice little executable: using the tool has never been easier. more about that after the links.
also the magazine rack has received an update after wayy too long, terror magazine #1. i've got a better scanner setup now so i should be able to get back into scanning my collection. no promises that it'll be any time soon, but we'll see how things go.
"I've been toying around with the idea of "industry exceptionalism." Of this belief, unconscious or not, that "videogames" are entirely analogous to "games industry products"."mhm.
"Every time a game is commercially successful that is made locally, or made by a small team, (...) you are expected to uncritically celebrate it, as if the fact that a product sold copies has anything to do with you or your practice or your life. (...) You are meant to believe that commercial success somehow trickles down, and any insinuation of the contrary may forever turn the taps off."
as you might know, i'd been meaning to try self hosting a gan for years now (at least since working on technobiogenesis in 2023, probably earlier), but by the time i actually tried getting ganbreeder to work, dependencies were all out of wack. python is a very sensitive beast, and one that i don't really know how to handle.
early this year the subject came up while the bestie and i were hanging out, and he offered to help me figure it out. we didn't immediately manage it, my python install got kinda fucked for a bit, but i did manage to get it up and running and posted that legacy tutorial about it and that was that. i generated stuff to use for that visual novel, even.
well it was good that i managed to put together something to (hopefully) help other people out, but it still rather bothered me that the setup was a bit cumbersome. because i really felt like hosting some sort of jam or art-making event that focused on these "older" models (pre dall-e 2 and its ilk, the way i see it), but the barrier of entry felt too high. there's a ton of tools that let you create art and games without being particularly tech-savvy, it felt icky to ask someone to run fucking nodejs. it had to be a single executable, something anyone could just launch and start using, but i didn't really know where to start.
not a week later was when i came across the manifesto jam, and wrote the secret horses manifesto as a way to air out my frustration with how the online spaces i'm in don't welcome experimentation with synthetic media. being part of bustling jam, it got a lot of comments, which my posts don't really (in part for structural reasons) which was fun. it was pretty nice seeing that generative work can still be positively received in the online circles i'm in... i knew it in a conscious level and from talking to a couple moots, but i think this made it very tangible... as much as i talk big about making self-indulgent stuff, i can't help feeling a little anxious sometimes yknow, so this made me pretty excited for future work! and it had me thinking the jam could work out well, as long as i resolved that wrinkle.
well, we talked about all this stuff, and he said the self-contained executable should be possible. awesome. we were on the train heading out, though, and didn't discuss it any further. a couple days later, just as i had realized i'd have to wrangle him into a discord call that week, he texts me a github link. "see if it works on your computer". a move i could only describe as having triggered my cuteness aggression. he wrote more about that process over at that section, so go check it out ^_^
so yeah!! exciting stuff!! i still have to think about and figure out the jam, so stay tuned for that... i think it might happen in august. it shall be announced via rss, and i wanna do it well ahead of time ofc, because i want to give people plenty of time to experiment with the tool instead of juggling both exploration and working on a project. though the jam itself i miiiight keep on the shorter side... 4-6 weeks is in some ways my favorite jam length because there's plenty of time to dilly-dally and look for inspo and so on, but idk... a quick and dirty two-weeker might be more my style. i can get a middle ground by allowing early starts though.
here are the badges i made for the father's day push! it was themed after movies so: a bunch of posters. these were really really fun to do :) i wish i could have come up with a punny title for jaws but there really isn't much you can do, and there is precedent for the shark via the maren shark hunter which is why i didn't use one of the orca bosses — they wouldn't have a good silhouette. i also think it's funny that it's just normal jaws.
my fave is the but i'm a cheerleader spoof, duh. since it was a flight event i wanted to stick to pretty mainstream stuff (also there was a big list of name suggestions, i just went with those for the most part), but i gave myself that one as a treat. well, the mimic was also a bit self indulgent, i had to have a horror movie in there... it took me a hot minute to realize the push was basically all in june, i think i might have gone with all queer movies if it was a personal event where instant recognizability wasn't the point.
and speaking of the push, ifr raffle prize for syndasch.
this one was a comm for sharkra. i'm really not used to drawing human chibis so this was a fun challenge ^_^
and these were just for meeee. ok so. i've been kinda rotating in my mind a little bit my new and updated version of the dreaded "i should make an rpgmaker game" which is even worse: i should make a little stg. it's really damn daunting though, i think a danmakufu script would be the best equivalent but oughhhh i like my shit standalone and linux native... don't make me reinvent the wheel with godot or love2d...
in any case, it's fun to play around like this, and i can always just make images and "plans" without really aiming for an extant videogame. i'm picturing like: collage graphics ala pmmm (or touhou reject: arbitrary prima materia!). bit of a dreamish story and setting. very simple mechanics and a focus on dodging pretty things. nothing too hard because i'm a bad gamer. and yeahh why the fuck not some pinup cgs huh. on both defeat and victory. nods sagely.
deltarune tomorrow. tgirl ralsei has already been genuine textual analysis for a while, and once she's out, trans woman rouxls kaard is inevitable. it's gonna happen on chapter 6, trust.
haven't mentioned on the last month's log but i've also been playing lots of angel at dusk (2024) again. i'd given up on chronicle mode around stage 9 but i'm grinding again (up to 24/32!). my opinion on it hasn't changed though: i still think it's FAR too long and a very repetitive mode, and not the good kind where stages become cozy and familiar. they don't really stick in memory (and i don't think you're really meant to memorize stages, just bosses) but sometimes you'll finally get to a new stage and it's something you can swear you just completed three stages back. so despite being a progression campaign it feels rather static. oh well, that's not even factually true, and more a result of routing habits. and i still appreciate how it forces me out of the difficulty comfort zone, despite this being my assigned "easy, quick and stratless" shmup.
and speaking of stgs i got my perfect cherry blossom 1cc :) on easy, which means i'm legally obligated to start playing on normal now. i'm pretty sure i've got what it takes for that (with continues), but i'm not really in the mood to grind out practice. but well, things are looking up for when the embodiment of scarlet devil remake drops ^_^
and i finallyyyy finished ace attorney: justice for all. took me longer than the umineko answer arcs lol, the original ds text speed is extremely low and it pisses me off. i actually finished on emulator so i could speed it up. gameplay woes aside it's a fun one! i liked the last case :)
no vn this month... i started on the house in fata morgana (2012) but i kept getting distracted so i haven't finished, i think i'm like 30% of the way in. it's good though!
insomnia should mark the true end of my nolan spree for now because i really really don't wanna watch the war movies, but i think it'll be hard to avoid getting a 100% completion... and i have already been warned i'll be forced to watch the odyssey on discord. so stay tuned for that on the july artlog -_-
i will not be taking criticisms except to maybe switch memento and following.
nolan has officially been my parasocial nemesis for so long now... i do think he's a thoroughly competent filmmaker but imo his status means he has not needed to grow. his movies become more ambitious from a production standpoint, but he cannot execute his high-concept shit very well in terms of story, he has replaced it with spectacle now that he has carte blanche and infinite budget. is this unfair? maybe so. but i cannot help but think he really lucked out with connections early on, which is why he can get away with being pretty mediocre. that's being a white man for you.
also he hates womennnn. i believe his only movie where a woman isn't a victim of significant violence is interstellar... a simple ddg search shows that feminist analysis of his corpus is far from an untapped well (in part because his work is so deeply hegemonic, no doubt) but yeah. brother here's a writing tip: just take one of the men in each of your movies and recast him as a woman. i promise it'll be fine.
also the amazing digital circus finale... it's fine. the series was mostly pretty fun but had its post steven universe moments where we were just hit over the head with sappy and therapylike shit. the finale really cranks that up for the sake of closure and it's just kinda lame. i still think it was a mostly good series, but the sum of it is a bit unsubstantial... jax was really good though :)
i'm currently reading corpses, fools and monsters (caden gardner and willow maclay). quite good!
smell ya later!