Has an interesting premise but feels meandering and overloaded with characters who have had little to do, only a few of which are particularly fun or interesting. The scattering of minor voice actors from Fullmetal Alchemist doesn’t help shake the feeling that it’s a lesser work from Hiromu Arakawa. I do love Gabby, though, and I would be willing to give a second series a chance to pick up.
I continue to be cynical about crossover shit but it’s clear that the people making the comic are having a lot of fun while mashing together their different dolls. Like, yes, this is largely an excuse to sell really awful looking toys where Sonic wears the Flash’s costume, but also Lex Luthor sleeps with Rouge the Bat and that’s really funny.
The 1995 film is my only experience with the series, so this was sillier and hornier than I was expecting, and it was interesting to see scenes from that reappear here in very different contexts.
Stylistically it’s a really pleasing blend of modern and old fashioned in a lot of ways. 1980s designs with very current animation; datamoshing and Deep Dream-esque effects alongside more familiar representations of digital and analogue artefacting; not updating the timeline so that 2025 is still part of the cyberpunk future; leaving in the comic’s footnotes knowing that most viewers now can pause at will if they want to read them.
That last part is limited, though. Where a comic lets the reader go forward at their own pace and reread easily if needed it can be hard to keep up with the show when it is throwing around political intrigue and worldbuilding at a rapid pace.
This post discusses and shows comics that are misogynistic, transphobic, anti-Semitic and fascistic.
If I there is a throughline to the writing on this bog (other than depression and Sonic the Hedgehog shitposts) it’s me gradually learning to reject shame around sex, and today I would like to talk about an awful, hateful webcomic as a cautionary tale about what happens if you just let that shame fester, instead.
Sinfest is a webcomic drawn by Tatsuya Ishida that has been running daily, with, as far as I am aware, no breaks, since the 17th of January 2000. I will give credit where credit is due: That is a very impressive feat. I will not be giving the comic credit for much else. It has become an utterly vile piece of propaganda over the years, but let’s start from the beginning.
The first decade of Sinfest’s publication is characterised by it presenting itself as an edgy, alternative newspaper comic strip, though it never managed to get picked up for publication outside of its own website.
Much like newspaper comics It even had bigger, full-colour Sunday strips:
These two strips are not representative of the whole comic, there is a large variety of topics, bits, characters and storylines that emerge throughout Sinfest’s run, but the temptation and sinfulness of women’s bodies runs through the whole thing. Ishida loves drawing sexualised women but is never fully comfortable with doing so. Initially, as seen above, irony is used to distance himself from it. The pinup is part of a joke about horny men, the demon girls, Fuchsia and Blue, are a temptation that is comedically rebuffed. But as storylines for these characters evolve, desexualisation is used as a shorthand for goodness and turning away from sin and evil. Fuchsia starts to lose her interest in torturing the souls of the damned and fall for a boy, and as she does she starts to dress much more cutely and innocently.
This line of thinking eventually leads to Ishida’s embrace of radical feminism.
Starting in 2011, Ishida starts introducing The Sisterhood.
This might read as a joke making fun of the girl on the tricycle for being unreasonable and hypocritical for lambasting a woman for her choice in fashion, but no, this is meant sincerely, even if presented in a humorous way.
In this period Monique, midriff pictured above, becomes a political lesbian and her one sapphic relationship is depicted as entirely sexless, pure. Lesbians don’t find each other sexy, only men do and that’s evil! Sexualisation in general is somewhat toned down in this period, but Ishida still sometimes indulges in showing how awful the patriarchy is by drawing some sexy, sexy, fembots who need to be rescued by The Sisterhood, who are made of of childlike—and thus desexualised and innocent—militant feminists.
Eventually Ishida focuses specifically on being anti-sex work and introduces Johnbies, framing the position of decriminalising of prostitution as the position of brain-dead, entitled men who just want access to women’s bodies.
Which, of course, gives Ishida licence to draw some lithe, seductive strippers and hookers to illustrate how vile and immortal sex-positivity is.
Inevitably this obsession with protecting women’s vulnerable, hot bodies from evil men evolves from SWERFdom to TERFdom.
Transition is portrayed as an enforcement of the gender binary, enforcing sexualised, submissive hyper-femininity on women and aggressive hyper-masculinity on roided-out, sex addicted men.
And Johnbies start being used as a shorthand for people brainwashed by gender ideology.
If this is all starting to seem less and less feminist and more and more conspiratorial to you then you will probably not be surprised to learn Ishida’s opinions on COVID vaccinations.
Vaccines, gender, oestrogen-riddled vegan burgers, people who are verified on Twitter, Nazis, the sexualisation and subjugation of women, religious dogma. These are all the same thing. These are all the woke mind virus and it’s coming for your children! It doesn’t take very long after this for Ishida’s feminism to be indistinguishable from MAGAism.
Also just look how bad this art is. See how stiff and lifeless everything looks compared to the earlier strips. The parents don’t even look like they’re moving. How do you draw every day for two decades and get worse and worse at it? And he was so proud of the woke Legion of Doom bit that he did basically the exact same comic in June and then again two months later in August.
I don’t think I need to keep tracing the rest of Ishida’s political trajectory in detail. It will suffice to say that, like many others, his obsession with trans people lead him deeper and deeper down the conservative rabbit hole until he became an open Nazi. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative or exaggerated statement of unpleasant beliefs, I mean he genuinely thinks that the Jews are behind the fall of the West and the Third Reich was in the right.
I have never been a fan or follower of Sinfest, even before it’s descent into open fascism, but I would occasionally see people online discussing its weird turns and every once in a while I would have a look at it out of morbid curiosity to see how bad it could get. It was fascinating to watch someone go down this path from radfem to proudly declaring how the white race must reclaim its culture despite, as you might have guessed from the name, Ishida not being white himself. And sometimes he would drop something incredibly funny in how pathetically low-effort it was like the Gender Riddler.
But eventually Ishida published a strip I felt finally made the story of the degradation of this man’s art and soul make sense to me, that made the pieces click together in my mind, and after that I stopped having an interest in subjecting myself to his work.
Sinfest features a lot of rambling, repetitive storylines that start off self-contained an then shift suddenly back to Ishida’s bugbears (though really that has been, for a while, just The Jews), but in April of 2025 he started a riff on Snow White.
The poison apple is overloaded as a signifier for so many things that Ishida has railed about over and over again. Liberalism is a Jewish plot to trick people into open borders to allow the great replacement, gender ideology and sex-positivity is a Jewish plot to brainwash women into being sluts, porn is a Jewish plot to weaken men, Christianity is a Jewish plot to make the West weak and gay. It is, quite frankly, as tiresome as it is vile. But what stood out to me was not Snow White herself, but the prince.
The prince, on a mission to rescue Snow White from being a slutty little slut, also takes a bite of the poisoned apple and starts to fall to temptation, turning into a soyjak Johnbie the moment he sees another sexy woman and then just, dying of being horny I guess?
And I feel like this summarises the poison at the heart of Sinfest—its original sin and the constant throughout the entire thing: Ishida feels guilty over finding women sexy and enjoying sexualisation. From the early ironic sinfulness, to the feminism, the anti-trans crusade, the conservatism and the fascism, he loves drawing women’s bodies in a sexualised manner and hates himself for it. He is the prince, failing to live up to his morals and finding enemies to blame for turning women to vile temptresses that he lusts after and cannot reject the allure of. Who is sexualising all these awful whores? The Devil! The patriarchy! The sex-positivity movement! The queers! The liberals! The communists! The Jews! Not Tatsuya Ishida, certainly.
The Snow White plotline does not actually stop there—the power of true love magically saves Snow White and the prince and they become a perfect, chaste, heterosexual couple and comic kind of loses track of any kind of coherent plot as it goes into various tangents about the Jews and woke brainwashing again because Sinfest is just a very bad comic even outside of its politics—but for me that was the real end of Sinfest. I had been fascinated by seeing the TERF to Nazi pipeline laid out step by step, but with this strip I felt an understanding of it click into place about what happened here, about how shame can fester into something horrendous and evil if you refuse to face yourself over it. And also so much of the comic after this is just about Hitler being right. There’s nothing interesting or worth seeing there.
Don’t read Sinfest.
Really enjoying this arc so far. I am glad that Sage has finally been allowed to join the comics and also that they immediately used it to explore some Eggman family drama with Belle’s resentment. The use of damaged asterons as both little robo-Starros to take control of badniks and as a mask to give them mechanical Cthulhu tentacles is a really nice touch and presumably calls back the hooded figure’s real identity as well.
Continues to be fine if not that interesting. I’m not fond of Metsli’s sexy native design.
Reckless use of tech for your own gain… That isn’t compatible with life.
The environmentalist themes of Sonic the Hedgehog feel more like a point of trivia now than anything else. Something to reference about the birth of the series rather than anything still core to its identity. This comic brings environmental messages back to forefront very direct way, but it also feels as much as a nostalgic reference, like throwing in Giga Thomas “Pen”, the giant penguin robot boss from Sonic Triple Trouble, as it does an attempt at sincere messaging.
Perhaps I am being overly cynical. It’s still a delightful little comic and I love seeing the bright, colourful version of this world that they do in these throwback anniversary comics and using younger version of these characters lets them be a bit cuter and a bit sillier while still being in keeping with their current personalities. Sonic is a bit less sure-footed, Knuckles even more full of himself while still being very inexperienced, Amy being shown growing from a damsel in Sonic CD to a hero herself, and Tails still looking to Sonic for validation.
When the Dragon Tower descends, doom follows.
A friend picked this up and I ended up reading through it while hanging out with them over coffee. I quite like the art and the very Dark Souls mix of low fantasy and monstrous body horror is great, but I am not fond of the video-gamey dungeon crawling setup (it took me a while to warm up to Dungeon Meshi) and things like the protagonist casually shouldering boulders and the mage’s dress flying up to show off her body when she makes a fire blast, as well as that I think that she is being positioned as a tsundere love interest, makes me think the aspects that I enjoyed are not going to be the ones that remain prominent going forward and I am happy to leave it having read the first two chapters.
That it’s a pointless side story is a given, but it’s a fun one. The art is an interesting twist on the normal Fullmetal Alchemist designs and feels very Miyazaki-influenced and I really enjoy how rough and flexible the animation can be. Does feel quite overloaded, with that train sequence at the start having so much happening that it starts to become comical, as do the reveals and reversals later in the film.
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
I keep accumulating links in a drafts for these roundups and forgetting to every post them! Whoops!
I am nearing the end of Furuhata Ninzaburō so in honour of that the musical accompaniment this time will be this remix of the main theme from Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix.
The first people annoyed by basket weaving were not students or faculty but soldiers returning from World War II. Basket weaving was one of many activities used in the relatively new field of occupational therapy. Weaving, knitting, and other crafts were (and still are) believed to help people with mental disorders, which included traumatized soldiers.
I have seen a few people linking to this blog now but I think I may have first saw it mentioned by Laura Michet. Davis dives into the history of terms and jokes that have become so cliché as to fade into the background of culture, their original origin or point unclear. They’re all worth reading but this one in particular shows a fascinating lens on how industrialisation changes culture and the perceived value of skills and how different assumptions that arise from those changes can clash.
The whole design of the traditional English house was based on this peculiar form of life and its associated norms of thermal comfort and management. The English preference for single glazed sash windows and open hearth fireplaces over European-style double casements and stoves was, among foreigners, a baffling but charming eccentricity, generally understood as an adaptation to the wet oceanic climate.
I am a simple girl. Give me an article on how societal conditions shape culture over time and I will probably read it.
Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.
It is very difficult to kill an idea, even if that idea has little foundation.
How would an anarchist society enforce traffic laws?” and “how would an anarchist society deal with rapists and other violent criminals?”, and similar, are perennial questions in “anarchism 101” type spaces online. I read an interesting answer on the former question recently. If the goal is increasing public safety, simply demanding that people obey certain rules is not very effective.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a book I have never really known anything about except its title, but I enjoyed this view into it and comparison of it to The Dispossessed and how they illustrate the difference between left- and right-libertarianism.
Another big part of the problem here is the way people engage with stories like this. (Especially young men in their teens or early 20s.) They treat it like it's not a story with ups and downs, but a sport. You root for your favorite characters, and when bad things happen to them that means you're losing.
I am disconnected from fandom spaces in general. Sometimes I catch site of a post, it often involves the phrase “it’s okay to”, that is clearly in response to some utterly baffling piece of internecine drama that reminds me that this is the correct path to follow. Similarly here, but in much greater detail, Bobby Schroeder outlines how angry fans made the character of Lanolin in the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog a central point of hate that I had no idea of. Lanolin was not my favourite character (though I do quite enjoy Adam Bryce Thomas’s little side comic with her and Shadow bonding over coffee) but the level of toxicity outlined here sounds exhausting. I do think that Schroeder might be ascribing more force to angry fans on Twitter than is warranted in motivating certain creative decisions, but it is easy to see why getting personally dragged into this stuff constantly would colour your perceptions of its impact.
The core problem was this: because it was so difficult to figure out how to do anything at runtime in these games, the only thing the mod was really able to influence was the moment the player received an item. They could see which items the player was getting and replace them with something else. What's more, this didn't work with items purchased from a shop.
Interesting high-level description of making a randomiser mod.
Mapping time to space to make a subjective real time that spans a greater period than is temporally possible. Making time hyper-real. That is beyond Oscar bait. That is Golden Lion. It's not quite Palme d’Or, but it’s definitely Grand Prix. But in video games it’s basic literacy.
I am including a video and you can’t stop me! Danskins puts into coherent words some thoughts that I have had about games, and specifically about Half-Life 2, for years.
I think this gets at the fundamental threat we pose to fascism, and to authoritarian structures more broadly. Authoritarianism relies on classification and stratification, on strict social order. Yet here I am, not only telling everyone in the world that I’m a girl, but having everyone either believe me or politely accept that I see the world differently than they do.
We are going to keep going.
Starmer's Government followed a plan by FG transplant Morgan McSweeney, to tack hard to the right to chase Reform on immigration, bigotry towards trans people and, weirdly, flag-shagging.
This so upset its voters that they got up and left, going to the Green party or just staying at home. It won them precisely zero votes from people who wanted Reform-style policies, who just voted for Reform.
An Irish look at British politics.
Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called what unfolds when you refused to notice friction a “war on paper,” a plan that proceeds without resistance because everything that connected it to the world it was supposed to act on has been taken out.
Really good read on how automation is actually being used, the ends it is being used to justify and the failure to talk about these things correctly.
The protagonist of Girls × Vampire is named ルルナ. The scanlation on Mangadex has transliterated her name as Ruruna, while the Kinokuniya USA print has gone with Luluna instead. Only the people doing the German translation at Dokico seems to have noticed that it says Ruluna on the cover art.
It’s the same cycle, over and over. I don’t know how to get out, and I don’t know how to keep going, either.
I got this as a Christmas present having never heard of it before. From the cover and the premise—the last survivor of a war against necromancers—I was was imaging something much more strange and eldritch than this book provides. The first large hint was the fact that the protagonist was fighting for the capital-R Resistance1. The reality of what I had started reading was cemented when a friend saw me reading and informed me that the book started as a Hermoine/Draco fanfiction. I was honestly less bothered by it being Harry Potter-related than with it being a romance. But I am stubborn and decided to stick with it, leaving it at my partner’s place as something to pick through when at her’s.
The fundamental problem with this book is that it’s over a thousand pages long. I did enjoy much of it, but by the time it stumbles across the finish line I was quite sick of it. There is absolutely no need for it to be this long and even its big structural trick could have been done with half the number of pages. Helena, the protagonist, has amnesia; she doesn’t remember the last two years of the war. Some magical process has blocked out her memories. As the plot picks up and tensions are coming to a head with her and her captor Kaine, Helena starts to remember everything, at which point the novel cuts to an extended (very extended–it’s over half the book) flashback to bring us, and her, up to speed with, before finally returning to the present once we’ve caught back up.
The most obvious possibility as to the source of her amnesia is that she did this to herself to hide things, which the bad guys bring up and them dismiss as impossible. Then later on the bigger bad guy comes in and says lmao she obviously did this to herself you morons. This kind of underwhelming or undermined twist happens a few times. At one point what is basically the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red comes into the plot. Nothing really comes of it for some time other than the characters will occasionally, when talking about Kaine’s inevitable death, remark that maybe the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red might be usable to save Kaine’s life, and then it doesn’t and they do something else that also seems like it was pulled out of Fullmetal Alchemist to save him instead. At one point Helena asserts that the stone was used for something else that I either somehow missed or was completely glossed over and only explained in hindsight. Either way seems like a stone containing the souls of the ancient dead should at be something a bit more than a red white herring.
Not that I wanted it to expand on the ancient lore stuff more than it did. The religious background of the setting turns out to have all been a lie, of course, but then it turns out the lie was also a lie and the main villain is also two different ancient figures whose real history was deliberately obscured and not only does this revelation feel completely disconnected from anything of actual narrative import or emotional weight, it also drags the climax of part two—the giant flashback—to a halt. That might as well have been the climax of the whole book anyway as resetting the narrative again after that and jumping from the end of the war back to the present of Helena’s captivity really takes the wind out of everything again.
The main purpose of the flashback section is to recontextualise the relationship between Helena and Kaine, but even though I certainly could not have predicted the plot I don’t feel like it really reveal as much nuance in the character dynamics as it thinks it does. Even if you weren’t already spoilt, as I was going in, that this is intended as a dark romance, I think that it would be fairly obvious that it was heading in that direction anyway and so by the time we reset to learn exactly how Kaine and Helena really knew each other before she lost her memory, the broad trajectory is relatively clear. I don’t really understand what people find compelling about stories where people who don’t even like each other develop feelings for each other (they do eventually bond over their mutual complete lack of self-worth and instinct for self-sacrifice, but this only comes after they have already fallen for each other for no apparent reason) nor the allure of edgy, dangerous, bad boys so really this book was never going to be for me, but I could have forgiven it that if it wasn’t otherwise so dragged out. Even within the flashback it can’t help but try to do further dramatic recontextualisations of the relationship, with the two revealing secret motivations and layers of manipulation at play in previous interactions that absolutely did not come across as having anything that deep going on at the time nor really explain much of anything that had previously felt mysterious.
And Helena and Kaine’s relationship is the only one that gets developed. Before the flashback we hear the names of various old friends, but even when we jump back in time those relationships have already fallen apart and we never get to spend any time with or learn that much about any of them. Evidently I am meant to give a shit about Soren but the only reason I could conceive that I might is because that in a previous version of this story he was named (I am guessing) Ron Weasley. The story was written with the assumption that you are already bought into these characters and their past relationships but has not been changed to accommodate the references to the source material having been ripped out.
And once Kaine and Helena’s relationship is established (over many, many repetitive scenes) it really shifts gears into feeling like a bad prequel to itself; exhaustively tying everything established in the present back to Helena in some way. Every new invention and technique that gets used on Helena she had a hand in creating, every character that has appeared she had met before, every big event mentioned in passing she had a key hand it. Recontextualising things like this is not bad (it’s the whole point of a flashback like this) but it starts to feel both excessive and like a checklist, with the story having a need to pack in every little idea well beyond the point it has become tiresome. By the time part two finally ended I just wanted the book to be over.
The book, thankfully, does oblige and doesn’t waste too much time in the characters fleeing to the countryside, entering a marriage where they still lie to each other and bicker over it, and letting the bad guy who already had his narrative climax happen back in the flashback die offscreen.
A name that needs to be barred from further use for at least a decade. ↩
It’s a promotional comic. It’s fine. I enjoyed Jet, Sonic and Shadow flirting.
My fucking god! These bitches gay! Good for them! Good for them.
Not sure how I feel about the twist with Olga. Will see how it develops as they get into Stalingrad. I’m sure that’s going to go well.
she’s so real for this
I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.
These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.
Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.
Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.
might fuck around and learn alkahestry
This post mentions cannibalism and has spoilers for the first series of Dungeon Meshi, though I will try to keep the plot specifics vague.
The question of the relationship of the soul to the body, of what constitutes a living person and the implications of cannibalism within such metaphysics are important to the plot of Dungeon Meshi. In the dungeon souls are anchored to the corpses of the dead, allowing them to be resurrected as long as the body is not destroyed. The more intact the body is the easier this is and even if one has lost a lot of blood or even a whole limb it can all be safely reconstituted back into the body with the right spell as long as it’s nearby. And as long as nothing has eaten it. Consumption and digestion of a body breaks it down, deidentifying it and reconstituting it into the new self. While rewatching the finale of the first series I was reminded of something I once read about Christian theology1. I do not remember where I read this originally but I will try to share my half-remembered version.
The Book of Revelation speaks of the resurrection of the dead. These days most Christians think of the soul as leaving the body when one dies, of the dead ascending into Heaven (or descending into Hell), of reuniting with your loved ones in the afterlife. Early Christian belief tended to have a much more literal interpretation of resurrection. The dead are dead and it is only in the last days that the faithful will, like Jesus, physically rise from the dead and live in the Kingdom of God, which is to be understood not as an metaphysical afterlife but as an actual kingdom on Earth that will be established by Jesus. As such it becomes important to keep the bodies of the dead intact. Cremation as a burial practise died off in Europe as Christianity rose to primacy, only becoming common again in the last century or two. If a body was destroyed, how could it be revived?
Even if one thought that, like in Dungeon Meshi, the constituent parts of the body, if scattered, could be reassembled and brought back together by the power of God for resurrection, what of cannibalism? If your body becomes part of my body, then, come the end of days, who has claim to the rotted meat that is to be resorted to life? Christian scholars took this idea seriously. To me this is a funny little intellectual exercise, but for many this question was important and existential. Can a body be destroyed in such a way as to sever someone from their flesh, putting them outside the reach of God, dooming them to oblivion? Dungeon Meshi ends up asking similar questions, though with the view of saving someone rather than damning them. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that an author who tries to examine and interrogate fantasy tropes and systems of magic—to take them seriously and think through all that they imply—might come to the same ideas and questions that theologians would when trying to seriously consider miracles and acts of God.
I don’t really have a great source and I didn’t want to spend time researching it, but a quick search turned up an old post on a Catholic blog that I am not going to take too seriously2 but at least quotes Augustine of Hippo and Voltaire musings on this question, showing it to be an old one.
When I first watched this it took me a while to get over the overtly gamey aspects of the setting. It’s an acquired taste, y’know? Need to chew on it for a while. But there is a great satisfaction in seeing the concept of a dungeon being carefully examined, butchered, and picked part. To consider how it works and what needs to be true for it to exist and for it to continue to exist. Its economy, its ecology, its lifecycle. And there is a funny, compelling and interesting story woven throughout. It is not just wanking itself off about lore. The story is almost fractal in nature. Examining from the top down the world, the dungeon, the adventures in it, and the monsters that make their way into the adventurers’ stomachs. There are so many little things to pick up on and watch out for on rewatch. As a small but amusing one I don’t think that I noticed on my first watch: During the first intro there is a party trying to use a dog to harvest mandrakes.
I do think it feels like overly direct in adaptation at times. Awkward asides that interrupt the flow of conversations and various little visuals that I think work better in a comic than on television. And the way episodes are so clearly two chapters stabled together with more than often very abrupt and obvious transitions in the middle. Towards the end these start to feel like they’ve really gotten out of sync with the storytelling, with a run of episodes where the first half of one episode continues quite directly from the second half of the previous episode, only to change to something different in the second half that will be continued in the first half of the next. The Golden Country, griffin, and changeling episodes all follow this pattern with the somewhat underwhelming finale being confined to only the second part of episode twenty-four.
Still, I am very much looking forward to the second half of this show.
I think it’s actually better than I remembered. Some things like bringing back the armour was a bit of eye-rolling fan service and I’m not super happy with what they did with Wrath, but it’s fun, it looks great and I thought that the politics are handled shockingly well. There are plenty of historical inaccuracies but y’know what? Maybe Dietrich Eckart should have transitioned.
Issue #84 of IDW’s Sonic the Hedgehog is out and features Sage from Sonic Frontiers in the comic for the first time. I have been looking forward to getting to see her interact with more of the cast and in particular Belle.
I like to keep my Sonic reading order page up to date and with Sage being added to the cast I decided to add a new little touch to it: Icons to show when major characters were introduced, mostly pulled from Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, with a couple borrowed from fan mods and a few drawn by myself as well. There’s still a few characters I’d like to add but I wanted to share it so they will have to wait till I have time to doodle again.
Comic looks great as always. Very funny that the first issue in this has a bunch of Sonic the Hedgehog’s friends celebrating killing a guy.
Shadow continues to be frustrating in these comics, stuck doing the same bit of being an egotistical dickhead who fucks things up by rushing in without thinking.
The Soleil/Lunar plotline felt a bit rushed.
Gorgeous art and a comic set in an all-girl Soviet sniper training school is a fun premise. I really enjoy the stuck-up princess type who thinks she’s better than everyone being an fervent communist who despises the aristocracy. Interested in where Olga’s plotline will go.
It’s because we run at different speeds that we were able to look after everyone.
Interesting to see Sonic in a story where he’s mostly interacting with humans again when the series has avoided it for so long outside of the live-action films. It’s been fun so far but has also felt like a fairly by-the-numbers adventure story and I don’t really love how Sonic looks in Imada’s style a lot of the time.
The foremost problem is obviously that the movie looks like shit. There is an underlying decision to try and make it look like the cartoon in a way that just does not work at all. The sets are sterile, sparse and over-lit, the CGI is charmless, the costumes honestly mostly work but everyone’s hair is awful. Roy Mustage looks like he just aged out of a second-rate boyband. Maes Hughes is just about the only character that works.
So why would I ever rewatch this? Because I watched it in Japanese years ago and recently learnt about the awful nostalgia-bait English dub where they brought back the original English voice actors for Edward, Alphonse and Winry and no one else and I wanted to both experience this and subject some friends to it. It’s an extra layer of trainwreck on top of the rest of it and is kind of fascinating to watch. Because they did get the original English actors back, not Brotherhood, and Aaron Dismuke as Alphonse is very, very noticeably not eleven years old any more, but you won’t be hearing that much of his voice anyway because Alphonse’s horribly-out-of-place-in-live-action armour is too expensive to have on screen so he gets immensely sidelined.
Meanwhile Vic Mignogna’s lines sound like he recorded them over the phone, which makes them feel even more out of place besides the much more subdued performances of the rest of the cast who aren’t reprising old roles. The English performances also feel constantly at odds with the body language of the on-screen actors, who are contributing to the attempted animesque style with some extremely hammy acting. On top of this is the fact that they have dubbed this more like an anime than like a live action film; trying to carefully sync lip movements to lines in a way that only calls attention to how what is being heard absolutely does not match what the on-screen actors are saying at all.
But gawking at a trainwreck is only fun for so long and, while the script does an admirable job at condensing so much of the story down to just two and a quarter hours, it’s two and a quarter hours of an incredibly poor rendition of a fantastic comic and show and the humour of poking fun of it wears thin before the movie is even half-way done.
Cool short little Ito-esque eldritch horror.
I was disappointed that the Knuckles’ Chaotix designs weren’t used here in line with the the other 30th anniversary comics. Still a fun a little story using the different art styles and character voices to pleasing effect and putting in a bit of light de-colonial subtext on a type of story that generally does not question the institution of the museum itself. Also I feel that the title should have been styled as Chaotix’ 30th Anniversary.
Fuck DC for being cowards.
The 2024 annual feels a little insubstantial, mostly being setup for upcoming storylines, but I always appreciate some more of Surge and Kit and Sonic flirting with Knuckles was fun. A lot issues #76 to #78 is also setup but in a way that is picking up the pieces after the big bang in #75 and setting up new directions for things a bit more. Lot of cute moments here too. Belle in her wagon house with Motobud, Amy thinking Blaze is so stoic standing stop the Tornado while she’s actually shitting herself, the big group hug with the girls and the gays and Silver the Hedgehog. All the locations are, of course, gorgeously rendered and I love the race sequence between Blaze and Surge, and the way they use the trails to contrast Surge’s chaotic nature with Blaze’s careful control.
I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.
I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.
One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.
I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.
I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.
Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.
he’s called Maes Hughes but actually he’s normal sized
Don’t get me wrong the film looks incredible and those moody, lingering shots are absolutely gorgeous and haunting, but it feels like at some point in painstakingly animating all of this they forgot to make the rest of the film. What I thought felt like the midpoint of the plot thrusts straight into the the ending.
They give titles to the homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist that mostly rhyme: Greed the Avaricious, Lust the Lascivious, Envy the Jealous, Gluttony the Voracious, Wrath the Furious but then the last two are Pride the Arrogant and Sloth the Indolent when they could have gone for Pride the Vainglorious and Sloth the Languorous.
What if instead of keeping the names of the homunculi in English when translating Fullmetal Alchemist they replaced them with the ecclesiastical Latin to keep it foreign? Avaritia, Luxuria, Invidia, Gula, Ira, Superbia, Acedia.
It’s really interesting to compare this to Brotherhood. They look so similar and have in large part the same core cast but a different musical identity and of course wildly diverging plots. Many of the same scenes play out but in a different order, in a different context, leading down a different path.
I find looking at different interpretations of the same story and characters interesting and it’s especially fascinating here with so much of the same cast. Vic Mignogna nails Edward from the start, while Travis Willingham as Roy definitely takes more time to get his role down. There’s a noticeable improvement between Mustang at the start of 2003 and the start of Brotherhood. Colleen Clinkenbeard gives a pretty different performance as Hawkeye while Laura Bailey’s Lust is voiced in the same way but ends up having to play a wildly diverging character. Alphonse you could almost be convinced is the same actor in both but characters like Scar and Hohenheim just feel wrong.
And it’s fucken good! It’s no Brotherhood: It’s weirder, it’s edgier, it’s messier, it’s much more casual about logistics and coincidences but it’s good. And I forgot how much I liked Wrath in this.
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).
Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻
But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.
On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.
No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.
Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.
When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral
1looks a lot like a capitalIor a lowercaselor a lowercaseiin most of the fonts used for printing books. An11also looks like ann, apparently. Google's algorithms made mistakes when reading the11thfrom a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.
This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.
Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer's silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it's doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.
I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.
the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.
I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.
This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.
Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.
okay so, something that's been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you're in gameplay or in menus.
Another multimedia CD.
Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that's only notable for being early. Today's disc is one of those.
My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.
Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!
Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.
A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.
Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?
Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.
Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.
If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?
This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.
And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.
Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.
There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.
But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it's trying to be.
I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.
Even putting aside my dislike for the naming scheme that simply labels it as a cross promotion and nothing else—art is ever more stripped to branding exercises not even trying to promise substance—I find it so strange that the title uses the brand name DC itself and not the Justice League. Is the name of the company really more of a draw or recognisable than the actual Justice League themselves? Do people get excited just hearing “DC”?
Still, this is about as good as it could have been. It’s very pretty (other than the superhero costumes the Sonic characters end up in which look atrocious on them), it has a snappy pace with each issue establishing a new set of ideas to play with before quickly moving on to set up the next one, and it has a few good gags and some charm to it. I especially like the bit in the first issue of the Justice League asking how the hedgehogs got their powers only for Sonic and Silver to say that they’re just normal men.
would transition have saved Barry the Chopper?
I have been setting up a few mementos of Ellie in my house. One of the things that I’ve gotten was some prints of her Discord avatar from the original artist, Aitor Sebastián.
Also pictured: A small print of a render of a crystal by Luna which I got at the same time.
I’ll post some more photos of my little memorial to her when it’s more complete.
I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.
One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.
And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.
Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.
We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.
She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.
She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).
Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.
I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
Your musical entertainment:
A look at how creative decisions and compromises get made on a movie set.
You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
My clone recently discovered Worst Girl Games and has been having a time of it. When I played it I actually didn’t click with Heaven Will Be Mine nearly as much as We Know the Devil but Caoimhe’s words on it are making me want to revisit it.
Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans' self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.
Cute little list and led me to this fun interview from Bad Games Hall of Fame with Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and to revisit this interview with Megumi, the programmer of Virtual Lab1 that I had read before.
Not gonna lie I did NOT realise how long Maddy Thorson had been doing Trans-People-Can-Double-Jump Platformers before making this list. Like, I thought that Celeste was primarily her drawing from the twitchy platformer style of Super Meat Boy but as it turns out, lmao nope Not only does Jumper predate Meat Boy by sevaral years, but the lead character, Ogmo, went on to appear as a playable character in Super Meat Boy, acknowledging the influence that game had taken from Thorson's work. Like, I fully had the order of cause and effect completely wrong here.
I swear that I am not going to keep linking to blogs by lifeforms that have been bred for thousands of years to sustain themselves solely on ever-more incomprehensible Doctor Who criticism but I needed to share the chips–soufflé spectrum model of media analysis with the world.
Note how chips becomes synecdoche for an ordinary life, an inescapable pillar of the daily grind as fundamental as work, home, sleep, and commuting. Chips is what the rest of us do.
There’s an inescapable class element to this. Science fiction is often accused, with some justice, of being a middle-class genre; even when it’s militaristic our focus tends to be on the officer class. A good deal of the value of Rose in the first place is that, as a working-class soap opera type of character, she does not at first seem to belong on Doctor Who. Indeed, often that’s part of her quality: in her first episode it’s her experience in her school’s gymnastics team, silver medal, swinging on a chain, that saves the day with straightforward physicality where the Doctor’s talk of Shadow Proclamations and anti-plastic failed to hold sway. Then she’s befriending the lowly mechanics and servant girls who turn out to be key to their respective stories.
A nice little piece laying out some interest aspects of the Transformers series2 through the lens of a particular run of comics including the historically weird handling of gender and how later IDW comics corrected that.
When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren't any women on Cybertron, then, well… I guess he's been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks.
Look. If Bret Devereaux is going to keep writing articles analysing the practicalities of speculative fiction tropes I am going to keep linking to them.
Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup.
Damn now I want a vector-based display again.
Everyone who works with interfaces should be looking at these and asking themselves why interfaces don’t look like this. Where did we go so wrong? Where’s the big fuckup where we ended up with like, windows 95 instead of this shit? This is something I have devoted untold and definitely irresponsible brain space to. And honestly, the best answer I have is very simple, but I think also a kind of interesting look at how our tools shape the designs we make.
Wijers doing an extremely important job 🫡
When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.
Quite an old one but recently linked to by Tina. What if your scanned just randomly changed numbers around in the scanned image? What multiple models of scanners from the largest manufacturer in the world did that for years without being fixed? There is also an accompanying video.
In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:
- Incorrect invoices
- Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
- Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
- Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.
First of a series of posts on this blog dealing with the hell that is trying to use Linux while blind.
Linux claims to support blind users here. It even ships the tools. But using them? Getting speech or braille output when you need it most? That’s a punishing mess of driver quirks, missing defaults, audio stack failures, and layers of modern regression hidden under the surface.
Anubis is a piece of software that has become popular for helping block unfriendly crawlers that have been overloading a lot of sites to grab data for neural network training without care for the damage they are doing to the web. It also has an cartoon character mascot that has proven useful for weeding people who like being dismissive pricks.
At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a "shopping cart test". If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I'm going to take any bug reports more seriously. It's a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project's success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.
Seen via a post by Fabio Manganiello going further into Bell’s treatment of people compared to what companies and academia both demand of them now, shared by Xerz and boosted by Jennifer Glauche which also inspired the next post by Elilla.
Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
On the empty promises and dehumanisation of Google.
It's the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids. Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.
Virtual Lab is a body-horror falling-block game that used the Virtual Boy’s 3D effects for the self-insert mascot character’s breasts. ↩
I was going to mention her talking about the distinction between the Budianskian and Furmanist modes of Transformers stories but while she does allude to this she keeps it accessible for those who don’t want to know a bunch of fandom jargon and just mentions the distinction as “robots in space” stories versus “robots in disguise” stories. ↩
Great cover story. Definitely not a vampire.
(comic is Girls × Vampire)
Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the best Dragon Ball movie with some friends. Saw this for the first time last year and I was shocked by how good it was. I had never watched Super, the last Dragon Ball I had seen was Battle of the Gods and thought it was awful and thought that I had just outgrown the series, but this movie is everything good about Dragon Ball. It’s charming, funny and cool as hell.
Some highlights: Pan is really cute and the interplay Piccolo and her and the rest of Gohan’s family is great. Some people genuinely and reasonably believing a sinister conspiracy theory around Bulma, Capsule Corp. and all the aliens hanging around with her. Badman shirt cameo. Hedo being vaccinated against bullets. Piccolo having just forgotten that one of his powers is getting big and having to be reminded as well as him not even realising that he turned orange as as new super form and then not really caring about it and just naming it “Orange Piccolo.”
This is a fun one, in between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. We still have fight scenes where everyone isn’t just flying, Goku still using his staff and Piccolo still positioned as an antagonist who only has a temporary truce with the Goku. The Garlic Junior arc was my favourite in the show a kid so I have a fondness for him even if he’s not particularly interesting here.
Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the closest thing to a Dragon Ball movie where King Piccolo is the bad guy with some friends. It’s the same as pretty much every other Dragon Ball Z movie. It’s fine.
talking about picking Saiyan names with friends and I am going with Choka, from artichoke
My friend Ruby said Tus, from lettuce.
happy Piccolo Day
I bought this from a German listing with no photos of the inside of the book. The cover was in English though so I took the risk and hoped it would be in English rather than in German. It was not. I ended up reading it using machine translations with my phone.
Interesting adaptation of the Ju-On: The Curse that eschews the nonlinear structure and ties the characters together more than the original; Mizuho is now the daughter of the realtors who sold the house to the Murakami and Kyoko is her aunt (and also looks very cool). It has a bit more gruesome violence than the movie was able to do with real actors. The gaps in the original film where the events of 4444444444 and In a Corner happen are filled in here with different, bloodier, ends to the characters. Kanna’s jaw getting ripped off, left to the viewer’s imagination in The Curse, here gets shown as Ma commanding stray cats to ram themselves down her throat until it gives way, which means that the Saeki family cat finally gets a kill of its own.
It also, despite the violence she is inflicting, shows Kayako as a more sorrowful character, wanting to end people’s suffering and being anchored, seemingly unwillingly, to where she died, but still aware of what she’s doing.
If there is a utterly dogshit movie in the movie night poll it is what everyone will vote for. Everyone knows that this film is bad but it is something to behold how completely the personality of Dragon Ball is ripped out of this movie to replace with a deluge of Hollywood clichés.
what if instead of Goku training super hard to defend the Earth from new threats they just gave Launch increasingly bigger guns
What voice I hear when I read dialogue in these comics varies a lot. When I read the mainline Sonic comics I usually hear Roger Craig Smith’s voice in my head as the hedgehog, but if it’s something where he’s a bit more immature it’s often Bryan Drummond. For Seasons of Chaos it’s Martin Burke from the O.V.A. with a matching Lainie Frasier Tails, but when I turn the page over to Sonic Learns to Drive he’s Jaleel White now. Sonic encompasses a bunch of different tones and styles and this book is a nice collection of some of the lighter stories with the younger versions of the cast.
Seasons of Chaos itself feels like it delivers on the promises of the Mega Drive miniseries that got cut short by the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic’s cancellation with an expanded, post-Sonic Mania cast who are also captured so perfectly in Aaron Hammerstrom and Reggie Graham’s art.
Sonic Learns to Drive is goofy fun that feels like it is hitting every single obvious joke to make but it lands them well.
Dr. Eggman’s Birthday and Amy’s New Hobby are two cute stories to end it out on, particularly the latter with its celebration of making your own little comics, which feels particularly meaningful given how much of the staff of the comics came from fan communities in the first place, and stands in stark contrast to how Sonic Boom and that era of Sonic media handled the idea of fan fiction with disdainful self-mockery.
I got this on a whim as part of a three for two offer, being a fan of Doctor Who since the 2005 series but only having seen bits and pieces of the older show and not much in the way of expanded universe material. I enjoyed it. The title story is by far the most substantial, trying to be a condemnation of the misogyny of a lot of sci fi adventure fiction but making the female cast suffer by way of demonstration. Emblematic of the approach is when Ace is told to put on a gold (presumably; the comic is in black and white) bikini, to which her response is to kick a guard square in the chest, steal his sword, and escape, only to quickly fall back into peril and be forced into the slave attire anyway. Much worse things happen to women in the story from there.
The art is impressive enough at times but often falls into uncanny and offputting in ways that extremely realistic styles do. It’s feels like making a comic out of stills taken from the show paused at unfortunate moments mid sentence that make the characters look as bad as possible. Included in this version are some redone pages that might be argued to look better than the originals in isolation, but in practise massively contrast with what’s either side of them in a terribly jarring manner. In the originals you have strict black and white with clear lines and contrast with the redrawn ones done entirely in digital brushes with no sharp lines and a million shades of grey. The contrasting styles could, maybe, have been used to dilettante the reality of Earth with the imaginary construction of the titular empire but that is not how they are used at all. In fact when I saw how the soldiers in fatigues looked in the painted pages I thought it made them look like plastic figurines, which I thought might tie into how Ace describes the empire of stinking of polystyrene cement, but those were the real UNIT troops, not part of Alex’s mindscape.
The second largest part of the book is The Grief which is a fairly middling riff on Aliens in which the Doctor guilt trips a guy into doing a big heroic sacrifice and then leaves him to die, followed by him in The Raven picking up a samurai to bring to the future so that he can murder a bunch of gangsters. I know these stories are trying to be part of an era of constructing the Doctor as a darker, more ambiguous, schemer but it just comes across as petty and mean.
Memorial tries to put this scheming to a better, more touching use, but the backstory being a highly advanced purely good lovely alien species being wiped out by another purely evil alien species seems very unimaginative, especially coming just off The Grief which had the same thing. Cat Litter is kind of fun with the chutes and ladders spread but I felt like I was missing some context reading it, which the commentary at the back of the volume confirmed and I have nothing much to say about Conflict of Interests or Living in the Past.
The story is straightforward but effecting and it is brought to life wonderfully in the art, especially Nathalie Fourdraine’s colouring and it’s a masterpiece in the use of light and darkness and it’s just lovely to revisit in in paper. And there’s just so many little details: The boarders changing based on the lighting throughout the comic, getting darker as they venture into the depths of the Death Egg and glitching out in time with Mecha Sonic.
There’s lots of great little moments throughout. I love when it briefly turned into Aliens everything turns green. And Mecha Sonic is just so cool.
I do think Sonic’s injured leg is something that he seems to just get over far too easily in the climax and really nitpicking things a small detail I noticed on reread: Sonic consistently walks putting his weight on his injured leg. I guess this is to make it more visible and prominent, and maybe easier to draw, but once I noticed it bothered me for the rest of the book.
I was in Forbidden Planet and decided it would be nice to have physical copies of some of the prettier Sonic one off stories and then I was told there was a 3 for 2 so I grabbed a random volume of reprinted Doctor Who Magazine comics as well
The Nothing Expanded Universe
Cute little action story with lovely art. Looking forward to seeing where it goes. Also knows how to seed in stuff about the world without resorting to too much lore dumping.
This lettering is annoying me because I know exactly what mistake was made when typesetting it and it’s consistent through the entire volume.
(the i should only be written with serifs when it’s a pronoun, but the font they used encodes this by having the capital i being seriffed, so they’ve ended up writing every sentence that starts with an i with a seriffed i)
I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop that I have a gift voucher for. I’ve watched the show before and enjoyed it so what I’m mostly interested in here is how it works as a comic in comparison to that.
And I do think there’s a lot here that works better on page. Something I’ve never liked in anime is quick cutaways in the middle of dialogue for asides or inner monologue. I think these work better in a comic panel where it’s just a little bit of extra annotation on the page but is almost universally awkward in a show where it’s cut into the middle of dialogue and messes with the flow of conversation. Dungeon Meshi isn’t the worst offender but it’s still not great.
The diagrams that pop up when people are going on a bit of a monologue also work a lot better when you can take time to sit on them, and especially the panels where the meals are shown off after cooking. The extra details of listing out the ingredients and nutritional information really adds to it (and as for the show’s version of that, I am a hater when it comes to overly shiny anime food, shit looks like it’s made of plastic half the time).
That said, the actual cooking sequences do benefit from getting to be animated. Those little montages of methodical preparation are satisfying. The actors in the show are also really good. I am fully just hearing the actors from the show in my head as I read. Except Falin. I never liked her voice. Sorry. (I watched it in English, mostly).
Then there are some issues I take with how they’ve lettered this in English. They have used a comic font with a seriffed I on the uppercase and a sans serif I on the lowercase. This is a standard way of encoding a comic font but the serif I is only meant to be used for the pronoun I and acronyms but they have clearly just typeset it by typing in the sentences normally, so any sentence that starts with I has it seriffed when it shouldn’t be. They also use a different font for asides which doesn’t have a seriffed I.
And then the onomatopoeias are awkward. It seems like some of them have been redrawn but most of them they have just scribbled in a transliteration followed by an attempt at an English approximation in brackets under it. Maybe that’s the standard way to do it?—I don’t read much manga—and I don’t know what would be the ideal approach would be but this way strikes me an awkward middle-ground that clutters the page and slows down my reading.
I think I will just wait for the show to come out and watch it as it does rather than continue reading this, though.
A true story from 1928 with a few artistic embellishments.
(And starring my disaster boys Jack and Al, of course)
Because I like to keep my ebook library organised and American comics are a mess when it comes to sensible making a series straightforward to follow I have been maintaining my own reading order for the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog comics for a while. I have intended to add this to my site for a white and the current Sonic comic Humble Bundle seemed a good excuse to finally do it.
I intend to keep this as a live document that I update as new issues come out and have it as something that I can point to people when I try to convince them to read it and they don’t know where to start. If you want to start from the beginning that Humble Bundle has the first eight volumes for €12.38 and for €1 it has Scrapnik Island which is a great self-contained story to get a taste of the series with.
If you looked at my reading order you might have noticed I had the Tangle & Whisper miniseries in the middle of the eight volumes offered in the bundle but rest assured that they are perfectly understandable without it. It’s not until further along in the series that the story of that miniseries is really built on more.
the law of e-Caoimhe-lent exchange
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
The longer we tolerate the little lies that robots tell us, the bigger the lies become, and the more difficult it becomes to untangle them from our everyday lives. This is not an inevitability, however; we can find in ourselves and in our connections with eachother the self-confidence to learn how these things work, to unpick the threads, to see through the smoke and mirrors that they are only barely veiled behind.
Always remember to Post Hog.
And yeah, sometimes I want to do that, if I'm writing about my experience playing a game or something, but I also have a HUGE list of ideas for blog posts that I plan to write "eventually" that I'm very much not posting because I think I don't have time to do it right. Because I think it has to be some level of "interesting" or "good" or "having a point."
I've forgotten the lesson of Post Hog.
I am honestly mostly linking to this for the absurdity that is the comparison image that Open AI used to show how “DALL·E 3 significantly improves uon DALL·E 2”. Look at this:
The older one looks somewhat like an actual oil painting while the “improved” version is a cacophonic mess that fails to represent what it asked of it while being aesthetically ugly as shit.
It almost makes me think that perhaps generative AI could actually produce output that is meaningfully better than it currently does and is at least partially hampered by simple obstacle that people who are making and curating these systems have truly atrocious taste.
The cookie example doesn’t seem to be on the site any more but the comparison they’ve replaced it with shows the exact same problem.
The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of clean air at 35 dBA. Nothing comes close.
Via House of Nettles. I am also still following Natalie’s posts about reblogging and keen to try my hands at doing similar with this site now that my rewrite to make posting easier is done. Also also from Natalie: This amazing look.
A distilled history of the TERF movement and its roots in reactionary feminism.
For the twenty-first-century feminist who has never heard of this schismatic moment and has perhaps swallowed the narrative that transphobia and biological essentialism were intrinsic to feminism’s Second Wave, reading the movement magazine the Lesbian Tide is an education. Morgan’s keynote was reprinted in the May-June 1973 issue but placed at the back in small type, sandwiched between contributions that all criticize Morgan and oppose her sabotage of the gathering. MacLean’s diary conveys participants reactions to the conflict on stage: “This can’t be happening. This woman is insisting that Beth Elliott not be permitted to perform because Beth is a transsexual.” “That’s bullshit! Anatomy is NOT destiny!” In her own contribution, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Elliott testifies that the solidarity she experienced “kept alive my faith in womankind.” Concerning Morgan herself, however, she states with dignity that “I personally distrust those who hate men more than they love or do anything positive for women.”
Via the Internet Archive, via Emma Zhou, via Peter Krupa via a reblog from Sin Vega.
This fairly mild and nothing that hasn’t been said over and over again, but it’s still sort of nice to hear it directly from Alan Moore?
Soon thereafter, caught up in the rush of adolescent life, I drifted out of touch with comic books and their attendant fandom, only returning eight years later when I was commencing work as a professional in that fondly remembered field, to find it greatly altered. Bigger, more commercial, and although there were still interesting fanzines and some fine, committed people, I detected the beginnings of a tendency to fetishise a work’s creator rather than simply appreciate the work itself, as if artists and writers were themselves part of the costumed entertainment.
A short story about being groomed on Tumblr. Mind the content warnings.
Friendly reminder that not inviting vampires into your house is viviocentrism. Stop being viviocentric!
OP, I don’t want to demand more emotional labor from you, but I really don’t understand what you mean. Should I really invite in every vampire?
Disrespectfully, go fuck yourself. It’s not my job to educate you.
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See, this is exactly the sort of bullshit that living “allies” always impose on us. OP made it extremely clear: Not inviting in a vampire is viviocentrism. INVITE IN EVERY VAMPIRE.
You may think that nested quote looks horrendous but I am just providing the genuine 2010s Tumblr experience.
Edwin pulls together multiple articles that are worth reading in and of themselves to look at how Space Marines have been sanitised away from their satirical roots.
It's saying something about how accustomed I am to the ostensibly parodic figure of the Space Marine being portrayed as a hero that I didn't really question this desire to make you "like" and "get" the "fanatical killing machines" at the time. To be clear, I don't think Saber are deliberately and consciously trying to kindle empathy for literal fascist enforcers in Space Marine 2. Much of the above reasoning is grounded in ostensibly neutral, best-practicey questions of craft and characterisation.
An old classic that I think about a lot. I hope Stephy Rei Holiwell is still doing well out there. This and some other now-deleted writing of hers meant a lot to me.
Games about killing should probably make you uncomfortable. They shouldn’t be carefully crafted to be pleasant. Metroid II is openly about killing. It makes me uncomfortable with wordless specificity. This is one of the game’s saving graces.
This article was also, I believe, a large and overlooked part of the critical re-evaluation of Metroid II, being the basis for Game Maker’s Toolkit’s appraisal of the game when discussing its remakes.
An extract from someone’s memoirs published in a local paper. I don’t think the book would be the most interesting thing in the world if I’m being honest but I found some of the quoted letters to an agony aunt column amusing.
We are four worried 17-year-old teenagers. We are going to our first dance soon and a friend has told us to refuse a mineral from a boy because if you accept it you are supposed to spend the rest of the dances with him. We would like to know if this is true. Also, if a fellow asks you to go outside does this mean that he is bad? And what should you do if a boy asks you to go outside?
And to explain the terminology: An agony aunt is someone who pens an advice column and mineral here means soft drink or soda. Sorry if I ruined the picture in your head of teenagers in the 1960s exchanging rocks at a dance.
The Computer Wore Pigtails is a series than ran in the British girls’ comic Mandy in 1967. It features Transy–“the first computer to look and act like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl” and–who is also extremely trans. Her name is Transy, like.
I first learned about it through Sophie Jane linking to the Bournemouth University UK Comic Database which has scans of three issues featuring the series: issue #42, issue #43 and issue #45.
Enraptured by the series I posted about it on Cohost where Kore was inspired to seek out more issues of Mandy and acquired several issues, two of which had new Transy stories, which she scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive: issue #44 and issue #46. I used Scan Tailor to make a printer-friendly version of Kore’s scans.
According to Girls Comics of Yesterday it was later reprinted as Electra the Sister with the Transistors.
