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july 2026

not much in terms of blogging this month, nor artlogging! bestie and i have been working on that damn stg, which is really really exciting but yknow. The Work. i feel like they're doing most of it while i'm only touristing in the code, but they feel i have a lot on my plate as well, what with the assets and creative decisions... you make a game in a genre where storytelling can be more abstract and then. decide to go worldbuilding with it. sighhh it's ok i do this for fun.

along the way we also updated the ganbreeder fork, so there's gene editing, tileability and image expansion! and as a reminder, i'm hosting the secret horses jam, starting soon on august 7th! a good excuse to use ganbreeder for literally anything you want.

also i finally made a language support extension for the love letter engine, which was really easy (as i knew it HAD to be, it's regex!) but since, despite codium being its own thing, it's still fundamentally microsoft shit so the documentation is ASS and everything is overcomplicated and mysterious and have i mentioned terribly documented. anyway. god this feels so good to use now. and quite useful given that's the syntax we're using for the stg. which is pretty awesome innit. i think working with self authored tools will always feel a little magical.

new on the site: our crimson cage review. i got an advance review copy for this which was pretty exciting lol.

• não-sobrejetividade linguística: ou, um RPG linguisticamente brasileiro
• clipart studio

media

games

• touhou eiyashou ~ imperishable night (2004): oh i got the easy 1cc far too fast here. i really need to be playing on normal. but ooo the comfort zone... i think the push and pull of this continue / timer system is pretty interesting, though it also meant i play extremely aggessive to try and get more leeway there. well, that's part of the fun. also i think reisen has my favorite spellcards here...
• false prem(i)se (2026)
• touhou koumakyou ~ the embodiment of scarlet devil (2002): serious mode. only playing this one on normal. i did get a horrendous first time clear though! not 1cc, mind, but it was still pretty cool to me... i liked it, the hidden hitbox wasn't too bad, and all the most famous girlies are here.
• death spiral (2026): pretty neat.
• touhou fuujinroku ~ mountain of faith (2007): i really don't care for this one. bombs being tied to power feels bad and continues putting you back at the beginning of the stage even worse, it completely takes me off the game when they do that. well i just gotta git gud enough to 1cc as my first clear huh?
• touhou kishinjou ~ double-dealing character (2013): played this one specifically to see how evil stage 5 is. it's very much so!
• mushihimesama (2004 / 2011): this game's really good, i love the visuals and music a lot. however. the fucker keeps crashing on me. the pirated copy won't run as an external game on steam, so i can't even try proton. and from my research it doesn't emulate well. fuck me.
• phageplay basic (2026): gorgeously disorientating. i need to reread this already. a new game by oleander garden and it's a stageplay. how wonderful it is to be alive.
• i used to be a black artist (2026): rather heartbreaking.

ugh so much going on i barely played the house in fata morgana. one vn per month was good while it lasted... well, eventually i'll finish it.

movies and series

• oppenheimer (2023): this movie bored me off my gourd jesus christ (i watched it across two days) and there's the annoying winking and nudging when something Historically Significant or Ironic happens. and ok look. i'm not the person to give this a proper political analysis. but there's this feeling throughout of awww it must have been super fucking hard to watch from halfway across the globe, from the town you had built in indigenous territory, and be celebrated as two japanese cities are fucking decimated. the nature of the movie is to show oppenheimer as this Great Man, and who's so complex and conflicted, maybe even more so than batman! the problem with him being accused of being an anti-american communist isn't that the red scare was a problem, but that those were lies against him specifically. of course a biopic is a biopic, in that you're following real people and events, but it's also fundamentally a constructed fiction in the way you choose to frame it. and well. nolan women huh. crazy how this movie like to be like heyy look how smart these women are! they're chemists and biologists! and then they do nothing. except have a little erotic / romantic drama and some Correct Opinions (when watching insomnia my friend said nolan has a kind of noble savage view of women, and it think it's super apparent here.). katherine, his wife, is constantly accompanied by her child crying like it's her fucking theme song because she's such a failure of a mother (don't ask me why, since the movie doesn't fucking bother). don't piss me off. nolan women count is 9 alive / 6.5 dead in-movie / 1 pre-dead wife. i think i'm giving jean a .5 character exclusively so i can count her as an in-movie death, else i think she'd not be listed here... katherine is another .5 because while she's a fairly constant presence it's not an impactful one.
• je tu il elle (1974): hell yeahhhhhhhhh this movie's really really good. it's hard for me to put it into words though... it's really about inhabiting its space and time i think. i liked being made to sit with it.
• amityville backrooms (2024): i thought i had suitably low expectations for this. let me tell you, my beautiful gardevoirs: i was so fucking wrongggg. this movie's fighting for its life to reach its 68 minute runtime. it doesn't even have the decency to actually be set in any sort of backrooms or a weirder haunted house. the house has fucking windows dog, it's like they haven't even watched skinamarink.. what actually pisses me off the most, though, is that the writer-director seems unaware he's making a horror movie, so all we get is a man ad-libbing to himself about how he can't get out and how mad he is that he can't get out (interspersed with some crazy dogshit chromakey'd news and youtuber footage) (it overall just looks like shit) (also sometimes it changes to a different man in the exact same situation). this is worse than creepypasta (2023). at least that one kinda had a grasp on basic storytelling. this one has no tension, no escalation, no stakes. in short, it's not worth watching even for a lark... maybe evan jacobs' more recent work, backrooms bigfoot (2026), would turn out to be a more entertaining affair.
• lingua franca (2019): ooo it's really good... i liked the quiet pacing of it.
• dunkirk (2017): let me tell you, this movie was not enhanced by the flying fish beer i was drinking. truly horrendous shit, it tastes like sprite on a dirty glass. now that i noticed nolan's mid-scene aspect ratio changes i cannot stop getting distracted by them. i'm sure they must have happened on other movies too, crazy that it took until oppenheimer for me to realize... in this one i also felt the color grading to be at times similarly inconsistent in a distracting way: sometimes the sky and sea look refreshingly blue and pleasant, and the next moment saturation plunges badly. on the other hand, harry styles was less distracting than i expected, given that i cannot tell these white men apart anyway. alright with all the petty bullshit out of the way, what about the movie as a whole? well. i already knew i wasn't gonna like it. i fundamentally don't give a fuck about the epic hans zimmer scored (wow such an original choice for a war movie — also it makes for the corniest ending imaginable) highs and lows of the dunkirk evacuation (an event that i'm entirely unfamiliar with btw, given i'm not bri'ish [you'd be forgiven for forgetting nolan is, given that he's the uk's first burgerboo {how do you like my play on teaboo?}]), and no one is really given any characterization that would make me care about them (save perhaps for barry keoghan and maybe cillian murphy, and that's heavily hinging on their performances and my pre-existing fondness for them). nolan women count remains unchanged. a nurse or two managed to get a couple lines in and that's it.
• the amityville horror (1979): yeah it took amityville backrooms to make me realize i hadn't watched this one yet. i didn't care too much for it tbh... there are some really striking visuals and it's mostly well made. though i felt it lacks object permanence a bit when it comes to the children, especially the boys.
• i saw the tv glow (2024): movie of the year of the decade of the centuryyyyy. maddy's monologue left me as spellbound as the first time. my friend loved it. smiles. but yeahh god i think i liked it even more on rewatch, the attention to detail in this movie is so good...
• la pianiste (2001): shoutout to repressionnnn. good movie, really tough to watch at times...
• evil dead burn (2026): it reminded me a lot of, of all things, ready or not (2019), down to the nearly identical ending. it is worse on most accounts, except it somehow has a more explicit feminist angle of heterosexual marriage as a trap and violence. it's also more feminist in that you can lesbian dry hump through the entire second act and not miss a thing, because the movie is paced from frame 0 kinda like a top 10 best kills youtube video. the onslaught of overedited horror-action is relentless and tiresome. it feels alergic to staying put, the camera is always doing some stupid fucking motion. there's a tiktok sensibility to it.
• leviticus (2026): ah fuck man. i need to be more careful about religious horror where it gets too realistic. that being said: preddy good! maybe it follows if it had a point in some regards... and also if it made you want to throw up. though i must say it's kinda weird how even though it's otherwise rather skillful it still looks at the camera and Says The Subtext a couple times... "they wanted us to be scared" yeah man I Get It. well. beyond being a movie about the horrors of evangelical homophobia in the form of a doppelganger it's also a kinda corny coming of age teen flick, so whatever.

i naively thought i'd be able to watch the odyssey this month and not carry nolan into the back half of the year... fuck me. goes without saying i'm nawwwt watching it in the theatre.

books and manga

• corpses, fools and monsters (caden gardner and willow maclay): it's a nice book. it really is mostly a panorama of trans characters and filmmakers, so not really a lot of idk deep / very novel analysis, but it was a nice read nevertheless. my watchlist is so full yum.
• our crimson cage (ladz): it's fairly fun if quite tame. full review here.
• the sittaford mystery (agatha christie): the thing about reading so much christie is that sometimes a book will start feeling woefully familiar, though i'm fairly sure i haven't read it before. i liked it well enough, but then again i like all of them.
• transcending: trans buddhist voices (ed. elizabeth marston and kevin manders): uhhh it's a lot like reading a 2000s blog... it's crazy to me that it's post transgender tipping point. i think that's because i'm not really the target audience. it is an anthology where people seem to be writing about what they find important to themselves, but the book's more aimed at cisgender buddhists rather than transgender people interested in buddhist philosophy ("it is my sincere wish that cis buddhists will read these stories with open minds and open hearts, and that this will facilitate more conversations in our sanghas"), so for the most part i didn't really connect all that much with it. though the closing essay (which should maybe have been the first, or an introduction) made me realize maybe it's also because so many of these people are californian. the book also features twice as many men than women, which is a bummer and definitely limiting the perspectives. an essay i really liked was one i'd seen on tumblr before (most likely the exact one that put the book in my radar some while back), working with nothing.
• little fish (casey plett): yknow. my grandfather died when i was like 3 or 4 and i have absolutely no memories of him. and in some of my weirdest most isolated moments i thought that maybe for sure he'd Accept Me as trans. so little fish had immediate appeal to me when i first heard about it. it feels like there's this beautiful infinite potential to a long dead family member. this is only barely related to the book though. i really liked it. rather reminiscent of nevada, certainly something that has been said before.
• the tombs of atuan (ursula k le guin): reread. not much to say, i like it :)

now reading the sorcerer's corpse by lori vornoy ^_^ the tone is much lighter than i expected, it's fun.

bye!

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