Cork

Caoimhe

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

My pokémon trainer sprite. A girl with an undercut with a sandshrew.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local G.A.A. club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

An old distillery tower spanning a stream. A clocktower.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

Sadako coming out of a TV displaying static.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

Eggbug, the Cohost mascot.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

A drawing of Lita Kino from Sailor Moon frowning with a caption next to her saying “This map is hentai free. Lookin’ for it? Leave.”

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.


Caoimhe

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

the little lies robots tell us — Melon

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.

How To Post — Mike Egan

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.

TIL cool math. Also we need knowledge engines that we can trust (that is: not chatgpt) — Llaura

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:

Two machine-generated images for the prompt “An expressive oil painting of a chocolate chip cookie being dipped in a glass of milk, depicted as an explosion of flavors”.

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.

My 6 Favorite HEPA Filters & Air Cleaners — Joey Fox

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.

TERF Island — Sophie Lewis in Lux Magazine

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.”

the embroidery tips page that forgot to close its <h3> tags

Via the Internet Archive, via Emma Zhou, via Peter Krupa via a reblog from Sin Vega.

Fandom has toxified the world — Alan Moore in The Guardian

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.

The V*mpire — P.H. Lee in Reactor

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.

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

ᵃʷᵒ°

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.

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell in Rock Paper Shotgun

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.

A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II — S.R. Holiwell

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.

Sex in the ’60s in Cork… and the racy agony aunt who faced death threats — Teddy Delaney in Echo Live

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.


Caoimhe

The Blue McDonald’s in Cork sits at the end of Patrick Street at the corner with Daunt’s Square that sits in distinctive, rounded building. This is formerly the site of Woodford, Borne & Co. and the lettering on the side of the building still promises “wines, fruits, spices, coffees, teas, wines [and] spirits”. I guess they really wanted you to know that they had wines. The Woodford bar at the back of the building on Paul St. is also named for this prestigious shop.

But since a certain clown moved in in the 1980s the building has become known to the residents of Cork simply as The Blue McDonald’s and it is still called that to this day.

Despite the fact that it has been painted green for over a decade now.

A local news article about vandalism at the “Blue McDonald’s” with a photo of the restaurant that is clearly green.
From Cork Beo.

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