dogs

Parent tag: animals

Caoimhe

Puppygirl ★★★★★

Caoimhe ⬥

via Letterboxd

Poster.

I thought the interstitials as they were in this version were very appropriate and were among many things that convinced me of the foulness of the dog.

Just appreciating all the details on this the second time around. The over the top edits, the silly interstitials. I love the little clip of Lady and the Tramp when Milo offers Lou progesterone and then getting to see them again at the end.

The moments where they are completely up front with random people about what they’re doing always feel like they are about to go horribly but people are just chill. I love Geena the dog walker smoothly pivoting to professional critique about how the leash they have is simply too flimsy to hold Milo. Truly love and understanding can exist between the countless different types of weirdos in this world.

Caoimhe

Dog Movie ★★★☆☆

Caoimhe ⬥

via Letterboxd

Poster.

I think the situation will resolve itself, honestly.

The camera has such personality in this. Takes some cues from the mockumentary style without the rest of the trappings. One my favourite moments is early on when Haven realises that Bloo is fully naked and the camera starts to pan over to look and then immediately demures to focus back on Haven (who peeks).

Caoimhe

Columbo S2 ★★★★☆

Caoimhe ⬥

via Serializd

Poster.

Very strong series. Does feel a bit less experimental than the first was at times but they have also settled into a rhythm that works. The only real stinker was Dagger of the Mind. They do lean into giving Columbo some more identifiable quirks with the car and the dog and they are going to bring them up enough times to make sure you know that these are his quirks and you will find them endearing but it isn’t overbearing and the dog and the car are both cute.

Caoimhe

Seaside town elects dog1 mayor

Caoimhe ⬥

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog1 that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby SPCA putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

  1. wolf2 ↩

  2. Dracula ↩

melon

redscale adventures

melon ⬥ via melon's zone,

🗘

I recently got hold of a roll of Harman RED; it’s a 35mm redscale film stock. Redscale film is film that is wound backwards in the film canister; that is, it’s wound in a way that you shoot through the layers of the emulsion back-to-front. This results in a large amount of the light entering the camera being absorbed by the red backing layer, resulting in images that are saturated with reds and oranges! You end up with these wonderfully strange and apocalyptic pictures. On top of this, some film scanning machines can get a little confused by this and try to correct the image by massively upping the missing blue levels in the image, which gives you this incredible orange-to-pink-to-blue gradient over the image. Let’s tell a little narrative with these dramatic crimson captures!

wild construction

Scaffolds give way to the infinite beyond above, gleaming a dark bloody rust as the rickety spindles of humanity stab the air in their sickly triumph.

fallen cola

Their chromed godsblood is spilled upon the ground. The parched earth soaks up what it is owed.

beep beep beep

False eyes peer from every edifice, searching for malcontent in the tired faces of long-gone wanderers. They report back their findings to an unlistening void, a silent obelisk, alone and proud in the data center that no longer stirs the dust with its fitful, air-conditioned gasping.

dogs

Their trust in us was broken. Promises unkept ring hollow to beings of unfiltered loyalty.

invent

Ingenuity drove the gears of malice. A twisted celebration of the force which ground the masses into slurry.

stairs

Homes within factories. Work within sleep. Solace within terror. Peace within war. All but mere steps from eachother, as the borders grew thin and weary.

tower

And so, as with all towers that race towards the heavens, the fall was at once sudden and glacial. And with time, the birds and plants regrew in the nooks and crannies of artifice, turning it once more back into nature. Those who were ground down into the earth sprang forth out of it again, the dancing union of clay and thought once again spiralling into new shapes to spite the entropy.

And so our story ends, as a new one begins.

(Can you tell I’ve been playing a lot of Caves of Qud recently?) Here’s a bonus picture where the film slipped and stopped advancing in my camera, and I got a triple exposure of a building, a cup of coffee, and a dog someone was kind enough to let me take a picture of.

triple time

Have a good one, folks!

Caoimhe

Wargroove ★★★☆☆

Caoimhe ⬥

via Backloggd

Poster.

This was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously. Despite the medieval fantasy facelift the game feels immediately familiar and charming but with a lot of thoughtful tweaks and changes to systems to make them fresh and more engaging.

I am very fond of the critical hit system making unit placement and countering much more thoughtful than a simple rock paper scissors approach of damage types and weaknesses.

I also quite like them sticking to the idea of making the different commander units representative of the different infantry types in the game to the point of having a dog commander.

The problem, though, is that this was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously and as part of that they tried to actually make it balanced! I don’t want balance, I want fun little weirdos with ridiculous abilities bouncing off of each other!

Every army is the same other than their commander, without even any passive buffs. Where is the guy who gets bonuses for roads? The guy whose artillery sucks shit but gets super buffed spearmen or something? I understand that they wanted to create a viable multiplayer game but I am just here for the story mode.

I mentioned that the commanders are based off the different types of infantry but even then they all have the exact same stats and only differ in their charge-up ability. The dog doesn’t behave like a dog unit, the vampire doesn’t behave like a vampire unit, they are all just super-footsoldiers. It’s a real shame.

And of course the other problem with this being made by Advance Wars sickos is that the difficulty is skewed pretty highly. I don’t think it’s massively unreasonable but it was harder than I expected and I certainly didn’t want to replay everything on hard to grind out stars, which you need to do to unlock the completely unreasonably gated final level. I ended up just downloading a completed save file to play it and honestly it wasn’t even that difficult.

Caoimhe

Cøping

Caoimhe ⬥

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

White specks dot the sea in a regular pattern seWen out the window of a plane.
Wind turbines seen from the plane.
A kabinenroller.
An Akira Toriyama-looking enclosed moped.
A shop called Normal.
Just normal men.
A stained glass window of a woman in a kimono.
Vela dyke bar.
A receipt reading “Cuiva”.
A valiant attempt from Gasoline Grill to spell my name.
A 7-Eleven with rainbow signage.
Found the gay 7-Eleven.
Ducks in lake.
Some ducks near Christiania.
A sticker featuring Yuri from Dirty Pair with text reading “HELLBOY OS BOYS”
I do not know what this means.
A meal.
Some vegan fish and chips from Atlas Bar.
Natu and Goomy Pokémon cards with vines and flowers hand painted on them.
Some little gifts for partners that I decorated at the Queer Krea Klub.
A very square-looking dog with white, matted hair and glowing red eyes.
An extremely fucked up dog painted by Nicolai Abildgaard.
A brown dog with a matted, brown mane but weirdly smooth body and also glowing red eyes.
Ditto.
A very sad looking dog with the body of a kiwi. The eyes don’t come out as red in this one but I think they looked red in person.
Ditto.
A can of Vinohradsky Pivovar.
A beer…
The back of the can with a radar chart rating the beer on “hop character”, “bitterness”, “carbonation”, “fullness” and “aftertaste”.
…with stats!
An ad for Cheez-It showing eyes with a spiral pattern and Cheez-Its for pupils.
Cheez-It hypno-advert jumpscare.
My being lit from below with some thin grey stubble barely visible.
Me after not having shaved for nine days.