So I’ve been posting on my Status Cafe over the past couple days about my time playing the Indigo Disc, and I have gotten a weirdly high amount of shinies (at presumably full odds, too?). So I figured I might run through all the random encounter shinies I’ve gotten over the years. (I won’t be going over Pokemon I glitched in with the coin case in Silver or Pokemon that the games just hand to you, like red Gyarados. As much as I’d love to regale you with the adventures I had with my shiny Celebi, Vidalia. I will be including Pokemon I have hunted though.)

Rarity is a really captivating thing, and I think adding in shinies was a really good decision for the longevity of Pokemon games. Once they had been introduced, there was always something to do even if you’ve exhausted everything else from the game. There are whole communities around shiny hunting, and showing off that cool shiny you found adds some spice to interactions between players as well, since they can be particularly valuable in trading situations. The games only enourage this by introducing new methods and game mechanics to find shinies more easily, like Masuda Method breeding or the Poke Radar.

Pokemon White was my first game and I remember learning about shinies about three badges in, when I was on a Bulbapedia binge, and being captivated by the idea. I daydreamed about finding a shiny Pokemon, until one day when I was lost and very trapped in Chargestone Cave, I saw it- a Boldore with blue crystals, almost as if it had been made with the rocks of the cave itself. It was my first shiny! I promptly caught him and named him “sparkle” or something silly like that since I was quite young at the time. I eventually renamed him Vesuvius around the time I finally evolved him into a Gigalith. It’s still one of my most special moments in Pokemon. (I was very excited that the Indigo Disc has an area based on Chargestone Cave as well.)

My second shiny was also in White, and that was a shiny Pawniard many years later. (rather stressfully, this was in a double battle encounter!) I asked my mom what to name her and my mom suggested Beatrice (after Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, since the Pokemon’s name reminded her of a line that mentioned poniards) I thought the name was fitting and phonetically sounded similar enough to slicing blades, and thus she was Beatrice forevermore, and I used her prominently on my team.

I never really found many shinies in Gen 6, which is odd because it was when shiny odds got boosted. Nor did I find any in Gen 7. I do think this was around the time when the Gen 2 games got added to virtual console, and while I did mess around with the Coin Case Glitch in Silver, I did do a legit shiny hunt in Crystal- the odd egg. And this hunt is interesting. Basically, you have a 14% chance of hatching a shiny from the egg, but how eggs work is that their species and IVs and stuff are determined when you receive it. So for each soft reset, you must hatch the egg. Over and over and over. But I did eventually get it after a couple days. my very own shiny Elekid, who I named Maggie. I used her throughout the game and it was a really special feeling having a successful shiny hunt pay off, even if it was kind of an easy one.

Once I got a switch and Let’s Go Pikachu I did another pretty easy hunt and went looking for a shiny Ponyta, since Rapidash is one of my favorite gen 1 Pokemon. One thing I love about Let’s Go is just how easy it is to hunt shiny Pokemon with capture chains. I also used this Rapidash throughout the whole game. Honestly not much to say about it, but being able to ride on its back is pretty cool.

I think after that was when I learned about the fan-run Pokemon Classic server that lets you access old events and trade online in the DS games. This really reinvigorated my drive to play the 4th and 5th generation games, especially to experience all the events I missed out on in Platinum. Gen 4 has this particular problem where all the event exclusive Pokemon are really cool and lore important, but you feel like you’ve missed out on a huge chunk of the game by not having received those events. Well, with Pokemon Classic I could finally go to all those mysterious places in Sinnoh, Unova and Johto. So while I was totally in the DS Pokemon headspace I decided I should finish my Unown collection on HeartGold. Anyway, while I was doing that I found my next random shiny, a J form Unown. I named it Janice. Janice is Hidden Power Ground, and thus cannot attack other Unown, which have Levitate as their ability. I found this endearing. Nowadays Janice and my other HeartGold Pokemon are living a happy retirement in Platinum, since my HeartGold cartridge is somewhat damaged and I had at least one “the data is corrupt or missing please try again” scare so I figured it would be a good idea to move them over.

I don’t have much to add about Sword other than I hunted a Wooloo before the DLCs came out and ended up getting both a Rookidee and a Wooloo. I also found a full odds Chansey on the Isle of Armor. Nice! I also found a shiny Sudowoodo in Shining Pearl.

I wouldn’t have any other random shinies until Legends Arceus came out, and on my first day of playing, I immediately found a shiny Wurmple. I named him Fortuna, since I was clearly fortunate to find him. He evolved into a beautiful Beautifly, and I used him throughout the game. I really love how pretty and subtle Beautifly’s shiny pallette is. While I was finishing up my Pokedex after beating the main story I also caught a random shiny Carnivine as well as several outbreak Pokemon including an Alakazam and a Clefable and I think also an Eevee iirc? Legends Arceus is, in my opinion, one of the best Pokemon games ever made, and I’m still so glad I have the special memory of finding a shiny Pokemon at the start of the game.

Pokemon Scarlet is also quite good (is this still a controversial take or has fan opinion swayed into the reappraisal state yet?) and I was pretty excited that in the middle of the game I found ANOTHER shiny Pawniard, so I guess it came full circle! This was especially cool because that line had a new evolution added in this game, Kingambit. This one was a male, so I named it Benedict (because I misremembered the name of Benedick from when my mom suggested the names for Beatrice all those years ago) and set to work evolving him into a cool, imposing Kingambit. (Who is less imposing once you realize his walk animation pretty much has him riding on a roomba)

The Teal Mask was shiny-less for me, but The Indigo Disc has been much a different story. First, I found a shiny Oricorio while exploring the coastal biome who I named Luan (which is, as I put it, 4 shinies in one.) Then I randomly found a shiny Electabuzz, which was also kind of a “full circle” moment. Then a random Trapinch (who I named Lovebug and put on my team) and an Exeggcute (named Sunnyside). All within a little over 24 hours. WHAT???? Did they boost the shiny odds for the Terarium or what? It’s crazy!

Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice holiday. I expect this will probably be the last blog post of the year unless something crazy happens, and I plan to move all the 2023 posts to their own page so you can navigate through my blog posts by year. Thanks for keeping up with my site and I hope 2024 treats you kindly.

Welp, it’s the first time updating my blog since I made it so I don’t have to manually enter a bunch of linebreaks every time I want to post on it, so it’s a weird feeling. But also definitely a relief.

So, yesterday I watched two movies, as is typical for when me and my gf hang out. The first one I watched is the anime classic Ghost in the Shell, and I really really liked it! I’ve had a weird relationship with cyberpunk media, a lot of it either entirely disinterests me, or I end up finding ones I end up enjoying greatly like Blade Runner. Ghost in the Shell has a pretty simple plotline about tracking down a hacker, but the lushness of the setting (particularly because it feels like a cyberpunk location where people believably live their lives) and the compelling humanity (and EXTREMELY APPEALING CHARACTER DESIGN) of our robotic protagonist Kusanagi make it a really interesting watch. There was some interesting thematic stuff about how being human adds diversity to our experiences, and I loved how mind-screwy it got when Kusanagi and the Puppet Master were plugged into each other and eventually merged, creating a new being. Pretty good stuff, and I very much enjoyed it. The soundtrack was really lovely too. Recommended.

The next film we watched was My Little Pony: A Very Minty Christmas, a last minute suggestion from me because I was in the mood for something seasonal. The third generation of MLP is pretty cute and I also have extremely vague memories of it and the sudden shift to all the toys being g4. I did eventually tune in to FiM and enjoy it (and I still follow some MLP musicians like the excellent Vylet Pony) but I was never quite “in the pony fandom” myself. I did, however, obsessively play two of the CD-ROM games from the g3 era, and I remember distinctly that one of them had a trailer for A Very Minty Christmas. And yet, I never actually watched it... until now.

A Very Minty Christmas is a story about forgiveness and atonement, and love, and caring for your friends. It is, unironically, (unicornially?) a cinematic masterpiece. This is only slightly hyperbole

Minty, our titular character, accidentally breaks the candy cane that leads Santa to Ponyville while trying to fix it. All her attempts to tell someone about what happened are quickly shut down in the rush of the christmas preparations, so she attempts to take on the role herself and give out socks as gifts to the other ponies of Ponyville while they sleep, so Christmas isn’t totally ruined, but Pinkie Pie catches her in the act and she finally gets to confess to breaking the candy cane. (This is also one of the funnier moments in the film, “Leave town.” made us laugh really hard.)

Minty then heads off alone in a hot air balloon (the ponies’ main mode of transportation) to look for the North Pole, to tell Santa how to get to Ponyville. The journey is treacherous and due to her clumsiness, the other ponies vow to go after her once they hear that she’s going off alone- even if they’re annoyed by her antics sometimes, they still care greatly for her. (Also at one point Minty accidentally kisses(???) Thistle Whistle? And apparently this isn’t even the only accidental pony yuri kiss in g3???)

The ponies all make it to the North Pole, but all they find is a note left by Santa, who has already left to deliver presents (cleverly dodging the question of whether Santa is a human or a pony in this universe). The ponies are disappointed that Christmas may have truly been ruined, and Minty apologizes, and the other ponies stress that Minty being safe is all that matters, and that it was an act of love that she went all the way to the North Pole for the sake of her friends. “You brought us to the most magical place of all,” Starcatcher, the pegasus with trans pride colors, says to Minty, comforting her. “The North Pole is pretty special,” Minty concedes, but Starcatcher points a hoof at Minty’s heart. “I meant in here- your heart.” The two hug, creating a shimmer of pink light. The other ponies embrace in much the same way, and the same pink light is shown glowing from the socks Minty gave out, back in Ponyville- bright enough to lead Santa to Ponyville.

The ponies return home to a fully-dressed tree, with Minty’s sock gifts stuffed with candy and presents. Santa did come after all, and left a note thanking Minty for the stocking idea, implying the Deep Lore that the My Little Pony universe existed long before our own. Starcatcher then states the theme of the film- that it’s not the glow of a candy cane that brings Christmas to Ponyville, but rather the ponies’ love for each other. The lesbian horse polycule then excitedly celebrates Christmas morning together.

There’s some surprisingly clever foreshadowing. Near the beginning of the film, Minty builds a snowman, and then tries to adjust its head. She ends up dropping the head onto the ground in her attempts to fix it. Desperate to atone, Minty returns the head to its spot, keeping it in place with one of her cherished socks, mirroring her actions later in the movie. The snowman has been shaken, the snowman is imperfect, but it was created with care and held together with love, much like Ponyville's Christmas celebrations. Another part of the foreshadowing is that when Minty is listing all of her favorite socks to another pony, these are all the socks she is later shown giving to her friends on Christmas night.

It’s also just unapologetically a very sweet movie, perfect for watching around the holidays and shutting off your brain a bit. Extremely cute, and the songs are catchy enough. Plus seeing Minty be the silly little gay horsie that she is is well worth the breezy 45 minute runtime. Recommended.

(I feel bad that I had more to say about the pony movie than Ghost in the Shell- they were both great, some reviews are just easier to write than others!)

So over the past couple of days I’ve been making one of the most substantial updates to my site, but it’s also, as the post’s title suggests, wholly invisible. If I’ve done everything right you shouldn’t notice any change... Muahahaha.

What did I change? Well, around when I first started making this site I got into one particularly bad habit, and that’s making my links and images be the full URL rather than the file path (think “https://wygolvillage.neocities.org/images/batgif.gif” as opposed to just “/images/batgif.gif”). This has no effect on the functionality of the site as it is right now, but if I were to ever change my domain name with Neocities Supporter, or if Neocities went the way of Geocities and decided to shut down, I would have had to meticulously change all this stuff anyway to get everything up and running again with a new host or whatever! So I figured I’d better nip this problem in the bud while my site is still (relatively?) small. I’m pretty invested in its longevity and I don’t want to be screwed over if I ever want to move it somewhere else. I’m satisfied with Neocities right now, but it’s good to have that safety net, I figured, especially when you’re using a hosting service like this one.

And this was exactly as obnoxious and tedious as you think it is. I had to change EVERY SINGLE IMAGE AND LINK by hand. It took a couple days but I’m happy to say it’s finally done. Everything should be ship-shape now. I’ve been doing a lot of “cleanup” stuff over the past few days, just little formatting things that make everything a tad nicer. Probably stuff you won’t notice, but it makes me happy.

Wow, okay, so you know when you remember enjoying something as a kid, that you have a really vague memory of but don’t remember any details beyond really general ones, or even the name of what you were trying to find? And then you randomly stumble on it anyway and go down a whole little rabbit hole about it?

In other words, do you remember these fish?

You might have seen them around, they were created in 2007 and I remember them being somewhat popular. I remember around the start of this website I recalled there being some kind of embeddable flash-based browser pet I used to love, and wanted to add to my new site- those were the works of aBowman! Though for a while I thought it must have been the BunnyHeroLabs pets (or maybe it was both?), I couldn’t get the memory of those animated fish out of my head, and I finally found just what the hell my younger self was so fixated on at the time.

Observant visitors may have noticed the addition of a fun little hamster cage on my homepage and in the menagerie, and that is also part of this odd little story of buried memories. So it starts like this: I was searching on marginalia.nu for sites about unicorns. I found someone’s Neocities shrine focused on the mythical beasts, enjoyed it, and went looking at the rest of their site (mostly hoping to find a guestbook so I could drop them a compliment on their shrine) and I ended up on their cyber pets/adoptables page, scrolled down to the bottom, came across a fully 3D rendered delightful little hamster cage, went “oh my god! what is this!” clicked the external link to look more into it, and then everything came rushing back. The fish. The original hamster gadget. The spider, the frog. Etc etc. It was all by the same guy! So of course I had to go down the rabbit hole a little bit.

First things first: HammyHome has to be one of the best browser pets I’ve ever seen. The level of customizability is just insane. Full on “magnum opus” status.

Second things second(?): I have this really really vivid memory of bookmarking all of the pets I customized because I could never figure out how to use the embed code on my... webpage...?

My webpage...?!?!?!?

This is the other strange memory: my first ever website I made when I was very extremely young. I had completely forgotten about it! (And here I thought this site was my first, lol). My dad works in a somewhat-tech related job at his workplace so I’m almost certain he was the one who set me up with it back then. And I was actually able to find that old page, still online even now!

I’m not going to link it- even the URL has way too much personal information in it lol. But the content isn’t all that exciting, it was Times New Roman black text on a white background and only a few images. I welcomed my visitors and had a few hyperlinks, all labeled “link!”, which I’m fairly sure I used to link to some of the promotional flash games made for my favorite animated movie at the time (all gone now), and a link to a video of myself that has quite luckily been privated LOL. There was also a blurry photo of a stuffed animal that I exuberantly labeled “feast your eyes on this!”

I also, once having remembered the webpage existed, vaguely recalled that I had some of those clickable virtual pets on it, like think chicken smoothie (I didn’t actually use chicken smoothie but the site itself was similar). However when I visited the webpage none of that was actually present, I wonder if I mixed up the memory with something else. I do at least remember putting those pets Somewhere.

Ah, anyway. Back to the aBowman browser pets. I bookmarked all of the ones I created since I couldn’t figure out how to embed or edit the code of my page, and then I got scared because I thought clogging up my bookmarks tab would lag out my computer because there were Too Many Bookmarks (I was a very silly child). I actually had pretty bad bookmark organization practices for YEARS, where I’d just fill my bookmarks with whatever songs I was listening to on youtube, and to this day my old Chrome account is filled with bookmarks of random Undertale OST videos and stuff... Definitely messy. Well, nowadays I use Firefox and my bookmarks bar is extremely carefully organized, so it just goes to show how you can improve your habits, etc etc.

I remember the original hamster was my favorite, so it’s funny how things come full circle. I still find the original set of aBowman’s browser pets to be quite impressively made, and I’m glad most of them have survived into the modern ‘net!

Welp, I don’t know how to finish this little disorganized post, but thanks for going down memory lane with me :)

So, if you’ve read my recent blog posts you’ll know I have been absolutely addicted to Vampire Survivors... After 100%ing the main game I went ahead and bought the DLCs. I thought Legacy of Moonspell was lots of fun, especially the pretty varied roster of characters, but the fantasy themed Tides of the Foscari was of particular interest to me because it implied a somewhat tragic story through its gameplay.

Vampire Survivors is not exactly what you’d call a plot heavy game, or a game with much of a plot at all, but it was a lot of fun to see the story unfold. Lack of character dialogue or exposition made it especially fun to guess at what was happening and notice story details.

So. Act One: establishing the characters.

The player enters the Lake Foscari map for the first time. They'll either go for the map or the coffin first, but eventually they'll end up unlocking the DLC’s first character, the sorceress Eleanor Uziron. I absolutely love her bright blue outfit and cute design (she reminds me a bit of Charlotte from Castlevania!) and powerful attacks, and I think the tradeoff of needing to dedicate three weapon slots to evolve SpellStrom is a pretty fun one that pays off when you finally evolve it. (Keep her status as a coffin character in mind, since it feels a bit like foreshadowing...)

By evolving Eleanor's weapons into SpellStrom, the player unlocks the next member of the trio, Maruto Cuts. Playing as him and evolving his Excalibur-esque weapon Eskizzibur into Legionnaire will unlock the final member of the trio, Keitha Muort, a ranger. She's the most difficult character of the three to use, in my opinion, due to how lackluster her starting weapon is, but her thief theming is really charming. Given the way the DLC is marketed, it's easy to imagine these characters as an adventuring party, and their blue/red/green color schemes certainly give the impression as well.

Anyway, by now the player has spent time with their new characters and has explored the map, and likely encountered the odd green crystal hovering over the lake, which brings us to...

Act Two: Unsealing the crystals.

If the player has noticed the green crystal, they probably also noticed the weapon icon inside, indicating what to do pretty clearly. And if you're like me, you headed straight to the lake after unlocking Keitha and evolving her weapon into Millionaire. Using the evolved weapon on the crystal will reveal the secret map, the underside of the lake: Abyss Foscari, and this area is surprisingly unsettling. Enemies creepily inch towards you in perfect unison, stopping and starting as if on their own rhythm (and some of their descriptions can be pretty creepy if you take a peek in the bestiary).

But the game plays with player curiosity in a really interesting way here: there's a new weapon as a pickup that you can see on your map. Unless the player has been going wild with cheatcodes, this weapon, Prismatic Missile, should be entirely new to them, as you cannot unlock it as a level-up item until much later after your first visit to Abyss Foscari. And as the player heads towards the strange new item, they’ll likely find their way to another crystal, a red one that indicates that Maruto’s evolved weapon is required!

So you’ll likely come back with Maruto, and unsealing that crystal will reward you- some of the darkness blocking your path will clear away, uncovering the rest of the stage, and you'll unlock the lady of the lake Luminaire as well. She's implied to have been the one who put these seals in place and she will be important later.

As you can guess, there is one final seal, Eleanor's, found in the newly opened path. I really like this structure, as it means that the player gets to enjoy and familiarize themselves with all three of the “main protagonists” and play as each of them at least once in both maps. All three of them get a chance to shine.

Act Three:

Once SpellStrom is used to unseal the final crystal, the player learns what's been so carefully sealed in the lake’s abyss: Je-Ne-Viv, the world-eating witch monster... thing. The player will be immediately sent into a boss fight, robbed of all their items, with one objective: survive, and gradually pick up the items necessary to evolve Prismatic Missile, at which point Luminaire will interfere with the impossible battle and finally defeat Je-Ne-Viv for real. The whole thing is incredibly cool but I think what’s really interesting to me is the implication that Eleanor doesn't live through it.

First of all: she's a coffin character. That doesn't necessarily mean she's dead, but it does feel like foreshadowing...

Second of all: at the end of the fight against Je-Ne-Viv, Eleanor gradually fades from view, and the White Hand is there to unavoidably kill her and end the run. While the Red Death and the other reapers can be killed, the White Hand is always unavoidable, as unavoidable as death itself. As Eleanor fades away, a tolling bell is heard.

Third: Eleanor's blue cap can be seen poking out of the mas of flesh in Je-Ne-Viv’s design. Je-Ne-Viv also gains some of the level-up bonuses otherwise unique to Eleanor (the different spells)

Thus I propose that Eleanor gave her life attempting to destroy the monster she unleashed. Luminaire, having also been unsealed from her prison, came to aid her against her nemesis who she had previously sealed away in the lake, and give Eleanor’s soul a peaceful end.

Based on Luminaire’s voice lines in the trailer (“These lands are not for your kind”, “Depart this place while your life is still intact!”) the story in my mind, in full, is something like this: three adventurers, a witch, a fighter and a thief, stumble into a strange land inhabited by fae. They explore together and eventually find themselves uncovering the abyss inside the lake, where a goddess once sealed a great evil, as well as herself.

Unknowing of what forces they were meddling with (supported by the final boss of the Lake map being a literal embodiment of nature!), the three adventurers undo the seal, unleashing Je-Ne-Viv on the world once more. But Eleanor, determined to undo the damage they caused, decides to fight her, and dies in the process, absorbed into Je-Ne-Viv’s corrupted mass, but not before she and Luminaire destroy the ancient evil together.

Pretty neat stuff for a game with no dialogue! I always find the idea of storytelling via game structure, gameplay, and player psychology to be really truly fascinating. For example, Castlevania 1 is a game “without a story” but it still follows a narrative arc with the initial climb upwards in the first few stages, with the final room of the castle easily visible in the distance, before being sent to the bottom of the castle’s caves, to eventually making it up to the pinnacle where Dracula waits. I find this style of storytelling really cool! Especially due to how it’s so tied to player experience, which is one of the unique strengths of video games as an artistic medium.

Sooo, yeah, I’ve 100%ed everything... At least until the new updates and the next DLC come to mobile. Then I’ll have my hands full again (what a wonderful problem to have!)

So, my Discord app fucked itself with the new UI changes a night ago. And I had a whole train of thought about that:

What the hell is with the way websites and apps make grand sweeping redesigns... with no alternative options? Like, after seeing the new Discord mobile changes, I just want to know if the people who run these things have no idea what muscle memory is, like genuinely. Everything requires at least two more menus to navigate between and it fucking SUCKS- and the change is mandatory, there are no legacy options for the app layout. Part of why I’m trying to move away from social media is that I’ve grown increasingly upset with having a digital space that’s entirely at the whims of others. I’ve sent Discord feedback, but I doubt much will happen. Many users disliked Tumblr’s new desktop layout as well; that is here to stay. No matter how I’ve seen people reject changes or injustice on bigger online platforms, their voices are NEVER respected (see: the Reddit blackout)

Discord in particular has laid a pretty elegant little trap to keep users, because it’s a program that, if you like the service it provides, will become your main mode of online communication. No matter what changes they make, cutting yourself off from Discord means cutting yourself off from other people, and this is inevitable. And I LIKE having chatrooms where I can be silly with my friends, I really do. But I have very little affection for Discord itself, or the ways it’s impacted the flow of information online. (“Just find the answers on our cluttered discord server uwu” is a blight on the internet!) But of course, I realized this too late, and now I’m trapped forever, because so is everyone else. The users hold no power, and the people developing the platform can do whatever they want.

I don’t mean this in an “I’m too good for this insidious platform” way or anything, because I’m not. I regularly use Discord and have for years; the worst events in my life happened there; the best have too. It feels like Discord is an entire half of my life. I would like nothing more than for Discord to NOT be yet another example of the “trap”, because of how so many people rely on it. Because as it is now, I cannot leave Discord. I have plans to leave Tumblr soonish, but Discord? Genuinely unfeasible. I’m already stuck in the pitcher plant- by design.

WELL WELL WELL December is here at last! And my Advent Calender has begun, you can access it from the candles on my homepage directory :)

And I’m finally done with the redraw of Moonshadow’s sprite, I’m very happy with it...

Here’s the old one...


And here’s the new one!

Much better, right?! I’m glad I could finally get her looking how she does in my head.

Also, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been able to, but I visited my local botanical gardens’ Christmas light show with my girlfriend... It was a really nice night and I’m glad we made plans. Drinking cider and eating big pretzels while seeing all the fountains and light displays was really magical. I always love going out to parks and gardens and stuff. Now that the weather is actually decent I should go more often...

Soooo... I finally got into Vampire Survivors (took me long enough lol). Everyone was right. This game is awesome and it is currently eating my soul. I’m especially pleased that I finally, finally have a game to play idly on my phone that’s not constantly shoving ads down my throat. Upgrading my weapons and seeing “number go up” is so insanely satisfying, and unlocking characters and secrets is so much fun (my favorite characters to play are Clerici, Poppea, Minnah, and Pugnala) The writing and humor is charming and the simplicity of the mechanics make it so much fun to just pick up and play whenever I’m bored. I’ve gotten pretty far into the game, having just unlocked the Eudaimonia Machine area... I have yet to challenge the boss there though. The sense of progression is really nice; I sometimes think about how much the huge swarm of skeletons in the Mad Forest was a huge roadblock for me early on, that’s trivial now.

And I’m honestly pleasantly surprised by how expansive the female cast is, considering Castlevania’s track record of damseling or fridging its female characters- so I get a huge breath of fresh air from characters like the trans witch Giovanna, the Sonia-inspired Zi’Assunta, the rockstar succubus Concetta, and the aforementioned werewolf Minnah who wields a bloody whip.

Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, there are a ton of cool moments too, like the Bone Zone, the ending of Moongolow, and the boss at the end of the Capella Magna. And can I just mention how amazing the OST is? Banger after banger, I never get tired of it.

So, yeah. I have nothing but good things to say about Vampire Survivors! I’ve never had something so perfectly scratch the Castlevania itch while not being in any way a Metroidvania. (Admittedly spotting all the various CV references is a huge part of this lol)

In other news, I’m working on reanimating Moonshadow’s sprite for Clovenglade, since I’m really not satisfied with the original one. I have the base sprite finished and I intend to slowly make progress on getting the animated parts done. She should look a lot nicer- and more graceful/magical- without looking too drastically different. (Maybe if there’s interest I’ll add some kind of secret option somewhere to select her old sprite :P)

No spoilers, but it is looking really nice so far!

Only a small update today I’m afraid, but it’s definitely a sweet one...! I have no idea what spurred this on, but my old Undertale fixation is back in full swing, and I’m particularly excited for what’s to come in Deltarune after having read the most recent newsletter update. So, I actually made a butterscotch-cinnamon pie with my girlfriend!

I don’t have a ton of experience with baking but it was absolutely delicious, the only thing we really “messed up” on was the consistency of the filling since it was a bit less solid than we hoped, but it was only a small issue and it tasted amazing, particularly with the Biscoff crumb crust. I definitely want to try baking some more in the future, it was a lot of fun! Ever since we made candy apples on Halloween I’ve been itching to make a bunch of yummy treats. Knowing that I helped make it only makes it tastier.

And of course I must link the tu-toriel we used! It’s a lot easier than it looks. I totally encourage anyone to try it.

So! I got my paws on the new Warrior Cats book, Thunder, which is book four in the A Starless Clan arc. And man... It's actually good. Like, really really good. I've seen a lot of mixed feelings on this current arc, but I've been really enjoying it. The political tensions of the Clans have been much more fleshed out, and so have the characters...

Frostpaw in particular really shines in this book. Seeing her learn to trust again and her cute new friendly dynamic with Nightheart on the journey was really nice (a "travelling book" that's actually good, who would have thought?) and the emotional arc of finding support, learning to heal her inner child and being able to face her repressed trauma and memories, was really well done for a series that usually fumbles this kind of thing. I particularly liked the scene where the park cats all shared tongues with her while assuring her it wasn't her fault that Splashtail took advantage of her feelings, it really hit with me for personal reasons. And, oof, that Curlfeather twist... I suspected it but OUCH

Nightheart is mostly a supporting role in this book which I think suits him just fine, his arc was mostly in the previous books. I like how he's mostly there to leave and provide an emotional catalyst for Sunbeam's arc, and to be a companion to Frostpaw on her journey. He's matured since book 1 but he's still got his arrogance and insecurities, and his chapters are mostly just for following Frostpaw's narrative (which I think was a good choice).

Sunbeam, being the only one back home with the Clans, is the odd one out, but I think her arc of finding community and fulfillment in the Clan she chose, ThunderClan, outside of the context of her relationship with Nightheart (who has left without being able to tell her why), was definitely needed, since she's equated the two throughout her POV chapters. It's also great seeing her stand up to her mother!

And of course, learning at the end that RiverClan decided on Splashtail as their leader made my heart drop, in a good way. I can't wait to see what chaos and horror ensues! A Starless Clan rules, in my opinion. And keeping me entertained and ready for the next installment clearly means it's on the right track. It’s not many books that I read in one sitting.

In other news... Tumblr, huh? Apparently there was a leaked letter from inside staff that implies that they're giving up on the site and moving staff to other departments of the company. Seems like the site's really going under this time, though I have no idea how long it'll be before this happens. Never thought I'd see the day.

Happy Halloween! I didn't really have a big post planned for the day of, but I figured... why not? Anyway, it's somewhat related, since it's about a horror series I watched recently on YouTube. And horror is seasonally appropriate, right? But perhaps this one is more suited for an easter special... Oh well, I had planned to recommend/review it at some point, and Halloween is just good timing. It's a little analogue horror series by the channel "The East Patch" called Angel Hare. Also, here's your spoiler warning, since I think it's worth going in blind. (Also, if media that discusses child abuse is upsetting you may want to avoid this one)

I have mixed feelings about analogue horror and its genre tropes, which is I think why I enjoyed Angel Hare so much: it subverts and plays with these tropes in some really fun ways. The setup of a VCR recording where everything is “wrong”- the protagonist Jonah finds a VHS collection of a forgotten favorite childhood cartoon, but he realizes that the contents of the VHS don't match up with his memories, and that the show seemed to have been communicating directly with his child self- is a pretty well trodden one, and if you're at all familiar with this subgenre of internet horror content, you immediately begin to expect that something sinister is at the core of the mystery, some unknown being posing as a cute cartoon rabbit with wings. (I love how the repetition of footage is used to build tension, and the way Gabriel seems to "break" the script while every other element of the episode goes on as normal is really good at achieving this atmosphere of “wrongness”. Lack of subtlety in analogue horror is another genre trapping I've noticed, but Angel Hare knows to keep the scares and unease a slow burn. As an example of a horror video/series I think could have used more subtlety, the Lacey Games series has so much potential, but I find a lot of it falling flat due to how it uses Ooh Scary Face Flashes On Screen and stuff like that constantly, when using the interface of a dressup game as a visual metaphor for sexualization is itself a really, really great concept to build subtle horror around, even without the Creepy Stalker With A Creepy Face.)

So, an analogue horror series about a Christian cartoon. That's what I expected, as I started watching the series without any knowledge but the title, so seeing the story unfold the way it does- with the slow reveal of the first 'arc' being about how Jonah's guardian angel orchestrated a divine intervention, alibi, and coverup to kill his abusive father, and erased his memories of this time afterwards- being both uneasy and really sweet, seeing the lengths Gabby goes to to protect this kid. I always really dig when angels are characterized like that, always striving to enforce divine justice at any cost and with terrifying efficiency. But the true horror comes not from some entity within the haunted fiction, but rather the reality outside of it. The scenes where we see Gabriel sweetly talking Jonah through how to hide in his room when his father wants to hurt him, and the equally chilling scene where she shows him how to dismantle a gun that was left out in the open so it can't be used against him- are short snippets that give a terrifying sense of just how nightmarish Jonah's childhood was. And the ending of the first arc, where he figures out how to connect with Gabby again by livestreaming the VHS recordings (because the show is only "sentient" when it's live, presumably angels can interfere with broadcasting waves?) is so extremely heartwarming. I think that’s when I realized I was really starting to love this series.

Arc two is also really fun, though it's more of a fun mystery romp than in the analogue horror genre (it does have its tense moments though!). After the easter special, it's revealed that Gabriel has gone missing. The show goes on as if she's just not there, over and over again... Until a different rabbit shows up- one with dark fur, golden wings, red robes, and a clear disinterest in the show he's participating in. And this terrifies Jonah (it's even implied that it brings up traumatic memories, if the way "HE" is emphasized- similar to how his father is referred to in the narration text- is any indicator). Eventually he begs to know where Gabriel is, and the strange rabbit Zagzagel finally responds: "I came to find her, genius. What are you doing?"

The tense allyship between Zagzagel and Jonah is really interesting to see play out, as Jonah locates the show that Zag is "from" so they can find more clues in a setting that allows for it, unlike the children's show Angel Hare. So, enter Wylde Hare, featuring the noir detective Zag Wylde. And they find her- being livestreamed for hours and hours has connected her to so, so many troubled people in need of their guardian angel that it stretched Gabriel too thin, and got her "stuck", trying to help everyone on the net at the same time. Jonah once needed her help, but now she needs his to really fulfill her role as a guardian angel. She's not used to the internet age- and I can see where one might draw parallels to how emotionally taxing it is to have access to all the bad news going on in the world at once. Thus, Jonah offers to take up the mantle that the Wreath production company once did, and work to get the angels connected in a way they can work with better, and help them become accustomed to the internet age as their “man on the outside”. Now Gabriel relies on Jonah the way he did on her, the new "angel broadcaster". The end of season 2 hints at a third angel as well, and the creators have stated a third part will come if they come up with a solid concept to explore. But as it is now, I'm pretty satisfied with the ending! Angel Hare draws you in with horror and delivers a heartwarming story about trauma, friendship, and relying on others, which I really didn't expect going in!

Something I like is that Jonah is not seen by the narrative as a "burden" on Gabriel. His offer to forget about her and move on is immediately shot down, and his arc isn't about letting go of his childhood comfort. It's about helping the people who helped you, and I found that really sweet.

I love the art direction stuff as well. The whole Angel Hare "show" is fully animated and voice acted. Gabby's voice is equally comforting and just neutral enough to sound sinister before the bait and switch (same with her design, it's extremely cute! But she also has a bit of a dead-on stare that can be unsettling during the early parts!), and Francis's timid voice is the perfect balance of cartooniness without being too grating, and his design perfectly evokes a priest's robes. Zag also has this sort of balance, his deadpan voice sounds really really wrong when he suddenly shows up in the childish Angel Hare but makes perfect sense in Wylde Hare, and the transition to Wylde Hare is around when we start to understand his motivations more. It's really elegantly done. There's some really cool live action footage mixed in as well.

I only wish that Jonah's perspective was through voice acting instead of text as well! It would have been cool to see him reacting to stuff onscreen as it happens. The lack of a character "voice" for him leaves me feeling the least connected to him out of the whole cast, which is really a shame.

But despite that one thing that bothered me, I really, really liked what this series was going for. It was a pretty short watch- so much so that I binged the whole thing in a single sitting. If you're looking for a fresh take on the analogue horror format, or something mildly spooky but ultimately sweet, Angel Hare is worth your attention.

Honestly I think that the media that always gets me in the Halloween spirit is always more spooky and less aimed at adults, than straight up scary. I watch horror year round, but around October I find myself craving more "treats" than "tricks", you know? I have no idea what's up with that, but Angel Hare definitely helped scratch the itch for spooky fun. (Now all they need is a Halloween special!)

I feel bad I haven’t been posting a lot in October considering I’ve been having a lot going on, but perhaps that’s why I’ve been away from the computer for most of the month :P I’ve been super busy with work as well as a certain... mysterious... upcoming project. I’ve spent weeks making graphics and writing for it, and I plan to have it go forward to the “actually-coding-the-page-layout -and-make-it-public-finally” stage in early November, since I’ll be especially busy in the next week or so. I don’t want to reveal too much, but it concerns itself with deconstructing digital nostalgia, and it will be by far my most ambitious project on the website thus far!

Hmm, other things I’ve been doing... I’ve been catching some horror movie showings at the theatre, and I rewatched Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with live organ (which was awesome) and watched Carnival of Souls for the first time. And it was really good and creepy! I knew next to nothing going in, and it was a really exciting movie experience. I don’t think I’ll make a full review, but definitely check it out, it’s on Youtube.

My Halloween plans are pretty simple this year, since obviously I can’t trick or treat (seriously, when are we going to invent adult trick or treating events?), so I’m having a mini Halloween sleepover party with my girlfriend. We’re planning to make candy apples and watch lots of horror movies and eat lots of candy. I’ve never slept over with her before so it’s really exciting!

As for digital seasonal plans... The Halloween event on my site will remain active until November 2nd or so, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, now’s a good time. I also have some plans for what I might do for Christmas season, provided I get it done in time for December (we’ll see how long it takes to finish my big shrine project...). But I thought an advent calender would be a really cute and fun idea, with each day having a link to something holiday-related or a bit of writing about favorite holiday memories. It definitely comes down to timing lol. I really like the idea of making more seasonal events for my site, since it leaves it ever-changing and dynamic to visit over time.

I hope everyone is having a great spooky season. October is definitely one of my favorite times of the year!

Alright, here are two quick little movie reviews. Both of them are films from the 70s, and both of them are about cults.

First, here are my thoughts on Fascination (1979). It caught my interest because I had seen it recommended before, and the imagery of Eva holding the scythe was really striking... The director was also behind one of my favorite movies, La Morte Vivante (I reviewed it a few months back!) so I was pretty optimistic going in that there would be something to like. And I really enjoyed it! I think Elizabeth is really the character of focus here... Her gradually falling for Marc, the cult’s sacrifice, and then killing her girlfriend and trying to help him escape with her was a really interesting progression to see, which makes the ending- with her going back to them, having drunk his blood, really a lot to chew on. And I do think she genuinely loved Elizabeth, even as she became more and more envious and possessive over Marc. Contrast how her sex scene with Elizabeth is shot and scored compared to every other sexual scene in the film... I dunno, I thought it was interesting.

I think the line “She’ll come back, she’s too much like us” is really what made me think about it in terms of it being about a cult, even beyond the typical “scary vampire cult sacrifice” way that it was leaning into. Throughout the film we see Elizabeth questioning the cult’s methods, trying to break free, having to cut off someone she loves in the process (via death), and then is reeled back in again. Or at least that’s my read on it. I especially think the scene where the cultists drink from Eva’s body plays into this idea. Even one of their loyal members is just food in the end. I dunno, I feel like this read could be a bit of a reach, but it’s what made the most sense to me. I’ve only seen two Rollin films but I like how both of them played with more nuanced, toxic relationships, compared to other lesbian vampire films. I like how it played into this by having the “girlbossing” of the cult really easy to find yourself rooting for... Thus, the viewer inadvertently buys in.

The use of color in this movie was also really good, it almost felt like the set was designed around making Marc’s bright red suit really pop in every scene he was in. It was interesting to compare that to La Morte Vivante which has a color scheme that felt a lot more “bleak”, Fascination was a lot more colorful and the outfits a lot more striking.

Overall I liked Fascination quite a bit, but La Morte Vivante is still my absolute favorite by this director.

Next up, Wickerman (1973), which I saw at the historic theatre in the city near where I live, which was an awesome experience. And what a cool movie!! Even beyond its impact on the “folk horror” genre, I absolutely loved the soundtrack and the visuals and everything. Pretty much everything I knew about the movie going in was that the lead character would be sacrificed at the end, and everything that was on the way was a total surprise. I especially liked the twist that the “missing girl” was a story orchestrated by the island, and I also like how Christopher Lee’s character, the leader of Summerisle, clearly didn’t seem to believe what he preached, if the speech about his grandfather founding the community is any indication. (Also, just in general- God, I love Christopher Lee, he has to be one of my favorite actors of all time! It was also fun spotting all the Hammer regulars, despite this not even being a Hammer film.) The 70s was around when there was a new age and cult boom, so it makes sense that this film would play on those ideas. I also liked how the protagonist’s attachment to his Christian beliefs were also kind of what sealed his doom. After all, part of why they chose him as sacrifice was that he was a virgin, since he didn’t believe in premarital sex. If he had given into “temptation” earlier on, he wouldn’t have been killed! Which I thought was an interesting subversion of how horror can sometimes demonize sexuality. So, in the end he gets an ironic martyr’s death, and neither religious approach is presented as 100% “correct”.

It’s a really stylish movie, and I thought the setting was really well used to build the mood. Too idyllic and pretty, and there are a lot of really well-laid hints to the twist later on. Overall, this movie deserves its reputation as a masterpiece, I think! I would absolutely rewatch it sometime.

Wow, I went a long time without a blog post! It’s getting all dusty in here :P Okay, so I just went to my first ever music festival and saw a handful of the goth scene’s best and brightest rising stars, some I knew and some I didn’t... and all three nights were incredible! There’s something unparalleled about live music, I think. I really liked the venue too, it was a kind of small bar but there was enough room to move around, talk, sit, dance, etc... About everything you could want from a venue like that! It was also amazing going with my incredible girlfriend, too <3

To keep this from getting insanely long I’m just gonna do a quick highlights reel of some of the most interesting bands, but do keep in mind that EVERYONE put on a great show. There was never a real low point, and I enjoyed myself the whole way through.

Day One:

We nearly arrived late- in fact, the first band started playing right as we got in! (the traffic was just awful...) Last Grasp is a fairly local band who seem to be just now starting out, since I checked their discography and it’s mostly singles. I was expecting the festival to be mostly synth-based acts, but we got a nice mix of Darkwave and some more traditional Goth Rock- Last Grasp included. I like how they leaned a bit into the campy vampire side of goth, particularly with “Vampire Summer Jam”, which was nice and gloomy and also “about the struggles of being a goth in Florida” (ha!). I really liked their set! (I also saw their singer walk in front of me like 5 times which was kind of funny)

The next highlight is definitely Nuovo Testamento, which is actually the reason I found out about the festival and bought tickets (if you recall, after I saw them open for Molchat Doma...) They’re always so incredible live, everyone was tearing up the dance floor. Cannot recommend them enough!!

The headliner of the night, Priest, was also really good. They were really playing up their Scary Robot Personas onstage, and it was a ton of fun to see. They also had a pretty long encore!

Day Two:

We arrived much earlier and got seats at a table before the place totally filled up, and the lineup was just as great as day one. The first highlight was Double Eyelid, I really enjoyed the guitar and the vocals. I didn’t know this band before the festival, so it was a nice surprise and I definitely added some of their music to my playlist. (Also the singer stood like 5 feet away from me during Night Sins which was kind of funny)

Astari Nite, however, I did know before going, and they were EVEN BETTER LIVE. I thought it was fun how many bouquets of flowers the singer was plucking petals from and throwing into the audience, I thought that was a neat touch. And they played one of my favorites, Capulet Loves Montague- it was awesome to see in person.

And the headliner, Light Asylum... I had a feeling she would be amazing onstage, and I was correct! If you get the chance to see Light Asylum definitely take it, holy shit! I think my girlfriend said something about the room being “electric” and that’s the only way I can describe it. Everyone in the bar was dancing like their lives depended on it. The only note I wrote after the performance was done was “INSANE!!!!!” if that tells you anything.

Day Three:

We arrived early again, ready for the final night of our Absolution. Everyone in the audience seemed really friendly on this day, there was a really nice energy there. I even saw some young children excitedly dancing to the music! (gotta get kids into the scene somehow, I guess :D) I had a short conversation with an older guy from Georgia about which bands we liked, what clubs we had been to, etc. and... You know when you have an “oh, I’m a real goth!” moment, like when you really know what you’re talking about and other goths are nodding along and you’re like “wow I really made it, didn’t I?” Just me??? IDK, it was cool. I didn’t know any of the bands that were on this day, so it was kind of exciting seeing everything for the first time.

Anyway, the first highlight is Tenderlash, who is actually like, mutual friends with a friend of a family friend or something like that, and I really liked her performance a lot! Especially the cover of Red Light by Siouxsie and the Banshees; I always thought that song was kind of underrated as far as SATB songs go, so I wasn’t expecting to hear such a great cover.

Nite was also quite unexpected, because they were straight up a metal band. But I kind of loved it? They could really shred, and their songs were really fun and catchy. (Their merch designs were really cute too, apparently they also were giving out hand made bracelets at the merch table). This night was pretty synths-and-darkwave focused so I think having a band that was so different put into the mix was a good call.

Blaklight is also worth a mention, because their stuff was incredibly danceable, so much so that the projector on the stage kept moving and getting jostled and bounced around, it was kind of hilarious. But the music was great. Well worth seeing!

And of course, the last act of the festival was Empathy Test. While they had some technical issues onstage, I liked their songs a lot, and I think they were the perfect choice to end the festival. Apparently they came all the way from London!

I’d also encourage you to check out the other bands that were at the festival: Aeon Rings, Violet Silhouette, Kanga, Black Rose Burning, Panic Priest, Night Sins, Helix and Matte Blvck!! Everyone put on an incredible show, and I’m so, so glad I decided to go for all three days. I just want to say that I love the scene so much. I love our music, our spirit of community... Everything. I just love being a goth! And this festival was a perfect reminder.

So, I got the Pokemon Scarlet DLC a little bit after The Teal Mask came out since I wanted to see what people thought of it first. And I had a pretty enjoyable experience! So I figured I might write down my thoughts-

The location, Kitakami, is pretty nice. It’s kind of weird to think about a new region (however small it may be) being introduced as a side area but I guess the Sevii Islands kind of already did that in FRLG. I like how the areas are pretty varied in design too, even though Kitakami itself is pretty small I never felt bored while exploring it. Some highlights are the Chilling Waterhead cave (most of Oni Mountain tbh), the apple orchard, the rice paddies, and the festival. I like that they added in a new minigame (Ogre Ousting) as well since I liked that about the base game as well. (Especially the snow slope)

I like the new Pokemon designs and I wish they had introduced a few more than they did. I like the Sinistcha line and the new legendaries, especially Ogerpon. Lately Pokemon has been doing a pretty good job at making the legendaries actually be focal characters in the plot, so it’s more easy to get attached to them. That’s why Koraidon is one of my favorites, for example. The human characters had pretty simple arcs but they were endearing enough, I really liked Carmine and I thought Kieran having negative character development (presumably to be expanded upon in the Indigo Disc chapter) was a really interesting choice. It was pretty simple but fun to play through. Having the side objective of catching 150 Pokemon to be able to encounter the new Ursaluna form was also a nice excuse to fill out my dex considering I usually end up neglecting it. Ursaluna is one of my favorite newer Pokemon so I’m pretty happy it got a new form. I also thought the final four-phase boss fight of the story was a ton of fun.

I like the DLC model more than the “third game” model that they’ve used to add more content in the past, but I also wish this kind of expansive and entertaining postgame was in the base game. Sometimes I remember that Pokemon Black and White kept like a fourth of its region to the post-game and I weep. Sometimes I remember Johto having the entire Kanto region as a post-game and I also weep. I mean, Legends Arceus (the best Switch Pokemon game imo) has a pretty good post-game too. But SWSH and S/V pretty much reserve their post-game to paid content, which is kind of a sad trend to see happen. Is The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero worth the asking price? I think I’d have to wait for the Indigo Disc to be certain whether the average player would find it worth it, but I definitely had fun with the first installment. I feel like I’m more fair on Pokemon’s more recent outings than most people are, so I’m also slightly biased.

ALSO, here’s the next thing I wanted to talk about, and that’s the last of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s updates and additional features. Chaos and Vs. Mode look pretty fun and I can imagine they’d be a blast with friends, the new outfits are cute (particularly Succubus Miriam I’m a fan of), but what I’m by far most excited about is DOMINIQUE’S CURSE. If you’ve read my previous blog post you know I absolutely loved Simon’s Quest, so having this announced right after beating it- essentially a Simon’s Quest inspired new game mode focused on the villain stuck in purgatory- felt like fate. Especially now that it’s been announced that it will be lore focused and completely canon to Bloodstained’s story. This mode was made for me!

I always felt like Dominique was kind of under explored, so having a mode entirely focused on her is really exciting. So, that leads to my prediction... I think this mode will be a posthumous redemption arc. Either that, or the reverse (possibly with multiple endings, Simon’s Quest had multiple endings after all). She is trapped in limbo, after all, and the series has placed her in a sort of moral ambiguity before. While she is the main antagonist of RotN, she’s also an ally and playable character in CotM2. And her motivation for her villainy, having her parents killed by the demons summoned by the Alchemists, also ties her motivation in with sympathetic characters like Miriam, Zangetsu and Gebel, who were also hurt by the actions of the Alchemists. I wouldn’t be surprised if this mode specifically explores and dissects Dominique’s morals...? If I’m right, I’m pretty excited to see how they could handle a redemption for Dominique.

That’s mostly it for now. I have beaten the original NES Castlevania and about half of Super Castlevania IV between this and my previous blog post, which is pretty cool. Classicvanias are especially fun when you play them with someone else and can take turns when you die, so I’ve been mostly playing with my girlfriend.

Other than that, not much to share. I’m considering getting into writing music again but no guarantees. I wish I gelled more with writing instrumentals, since every other part of the process is a lot of fun. It’s just instrumentals I find really tedious. We’ll see!

So! First blog post of September. I had gone a little while without doing much gaming apart from WolfQuest, so I decided to get back into the swing of things by trying out Simon’s Quest, as I hadn’t beaten it before, and I had very little experience with the retro platformer side of Castlevania- mostly the metroidvanias.

Simon’s Quest, in all its lopsided ambition, had always intrigued me. I mean, it’s a very early video game with an open world and a day-night cycle, which went on to be ubiquitous in a lot of modern games. Generally the impression I got beforehand was that it was probably not as bad as people said, but still pretty clunky and overly cryptic... I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected, though! Simon’s Quest unironically rules.

First of all, its cryptic nature is not unique at all. A lot of adventure-y NES games are equally if not more cryptic (I found the original Legend of Zelda a lot less easily approachable, and that game is considered a classic!) And a lot of that is simply due to the translation errors and constraints, where hints and clues become pretty scrambled. But even with some of the more obtuse puzzles, like the infamous red crystal at Deborah Cliff one, had text in-game alluding to how they’re completed. If you reach that point in the game, you’ve almost certainly knelt with a crystal before to venture beneath a lake, so it’s not nearly as unintuitive as it seems... Still, I did play this game with a walkthrough, and I think having easy access to puzzle answers in case you get stuck has made this game age a little better. You’re going to have a more enjoyable experience with the ability to find a little help if you need it.

I really like the sense of progression in this game. Finding the full collection of interesting subweapons, abilities and whip upgrades feels really nice, and it feels so awesome when you finally get that fully upgraded flame whip. I was worried that there would be a lot of grinding, but after the first town or so you don’t really need to grind all that much for currency. The enemies are alright, but most of the challenge of this game comes from navigating your environment, which I like just fine. The bosses are a little underwhelming once you figure out that two of them can be stunlocked- including Dracula, lol. But I would argue that working your way up to feeling super-powerful is part of the appeal, at least for me. I took a somewhat meandering path and ended up with the second best ending, which surprised me, since I expected to get the “bad ending”, seeing as I really took my time with the game. (I am still convinced the ending text got scrambled though, idc what anyone says...)

I also think Simon’s Quest excels at atmosphere! The bustling towns going completely dark and locked up at night, the mysterious graveyards and swamps, the hushed warnings of the villagers, and the empty, eerie silence of the journey to the heart of Dracula’s Castle are all incredible at getting you into the right mood. It really did remind me of those classic horror movies it takes so much inspiration from. It just feels nice to explore and traverse the mysterious countryside. I like how as you progress through the game, the townsfolk grow less and less friendly, until you reach the last village, which is nearly completely empty... Spooky. The soundtrack complements it as well, and early on you can really find yourself dreading nightfall. As you progress, though, it’s a lot easier to handle what the game throws at you, which lends to that sense of progression I mentioned.

I’m going to get a little controversial and say that this is probably the best NES game I’ve played so far (though I haven’t played a huge ton of them, so take that opinion with a grain of salt). I think Simon’s Quest’s reputation is a little unfair, honestly. It’s just a nice, enjoyable horror-tinged adventure, and worth giving a shot! And given that IGA cited it as an inspiration for what he would eventually do with Symphony of the Night, its influence really did change the identity of the series over time. (And, hey, my favorite Castlevania game is sort of a stealth-remake of Simon's Quest, of course I'd end up loving it!!)

Also, does anyone else like to save and quit video games at a nice and pleasant village or hub world when you’re finished with them so the player character can “live there”? I always save OoE at Wygol Village before I turn off the game, and I took Simon back to Jova before I closed the book on Simon’s Quest, and so on... I assume it’s an “autistic people can have empathy for inanimate things” kind of thing, but I literally always do this!

Hey everyone! Bit of a different kind of blog post this time around, that pertains to one of my favorite video games, but I had an idea for a hypothetical WolfQuest Anniversary Edition challenge run. The basic idea is that you adapt the game to the various gameplay features of the old “legacy” version of the game, since I’m a longtime player... So, I figured I might put it on my site for anyone who’s into the game. (Bit of a niche audience I would imagine?)

“LEGACY/2.5 STYLE” CHALLENGE

Some general rules: Your wolf must find a mate in Amethyst Mountain, and move to Slough Creek when the first family snapshot is generated. As a general rule you can only hunt elk or hares. You may not pick any age perks.

AMETHYST MOUNTAIN

-In addition to the two required elk hunts, you must win an encounter with every stranger wolf pack on their territory in Amethyst Mountain before you can choose a mate.

-You can only court wolves while deep in stranger pack territory, not on No-Man’s-Land. (Whether the mate you choose is a dispersal or a pack wolf doesn’t matter, though.)

-OPTIONAL RULE: Try to aim for mates that will grant you a litter size close to 4 or so. (This is optional since it’s a bit hard to predict or guarantee litter size)

SLOUGH CREEK

-Once in Slough Creek, you may only settle territory around the “First Meadow” area. Additionally, the only dens you are permitted to settle in are the three legacy dens (The stump den at Bison Peak Cutoff, the rock den at Aspen Heights, and the rock den at Saddle Meadows). If forced to move your pack must remain nomadic until they can settle at a rendezvous point. Moving dens wasn’t in Legacy after all ;)

-Pups can only eat regurgitant and not solid food.

-OPTIONAL RULE: No Woofing during predator attacks (unsure of how balanced this would be hence why it’s optional)

-The only rendezvous point you may choose is the one in Douglas Fir Slopes where the original journey takes you. You MUST cross the creek at least once during your journey. Once the Journey is over, you’ve technically won the Legacy Style challenge (That’s where the original game ended, after all) and you may lift restrictions or keep them as you see fit while loafing.

SUPER EXTRA HARD VERSION:

You may only have one territory hex at a time, and it must be where your current home site is. You will likely have to venture outside of it to hunt. THIS RULE IS OPTIONAL FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, but it provides an extra level of challenge to the game.

Enjoy!!!

Hell. Yes. I have been WAITING for this movie, and it did not disappoint. The film takes a relatively simple chapter- a crew full of sailors is picked off one by one by Dracula on their way to London- and expands it into a thrilling tragedy.

Though you know the crew is doomed from the very start, it's very easy to get attached to the various members of the Demeter. As a result, some deaths hit pretty hard (not spoiling but OOF). I also quite liked the motif of knocking on wood to signal for help and how Dracula spitefully mocks the same sound near the end, it was pretty chilling!

My favorite characters were absolutely Clemens the ship doctor, and Anna (her "he fills you with dirt" speech is one of my favorite parts of the film, the implications are just heartbreaking...), since they received the most screen time overall, but other highlights involve the captain and his son, and the first mate. I wasn't sure what I was expecting from the more animalistic/bestial take on Dracula, but he can be pretty scary (though I think the turned crewmember who began stalking Toby around the ship was even scarier!) and more importantly allows for the crew to be the real stars rather than stealing the limelight.

I had seen the film compared to Alien and The Thing and I agree with this; tonewise it's pretty similar to those films. And my God is it a tragedy! The way to make a good tragedy is to dangle hope in front of the audience, which this movie excels at. It's really gripping seeing all the various escape plans unravel, until (almost) the entire crew is dead. There is one survivor at the end, but I think the movie really earns that small victory.

The way it plays with the themes of the novel- can science or superstition understand something supernatural?- is also quite nice. It really does feel like it was made with a lot of love for the source material.

Once again I'm pretty sad that a new Dracula film I ended up enjoying is currently a total FLOP at the box office!! (pour one out for Renfield) I mean, come on, are vampires just not in fashion anymore? Anyway, I hope that if the weird little trend of Dracula movies that expand on one specific aspect or part of the book continues, we get a full-blown Lucy movie telling the story of how she died. She deserves it, after getting mischaracterized for years and years :P

So, yeah. Good movie! Give it a chance if you can see it in theatres. I'll be sad if it's remembered as nothing more than a box office bomb. My girlfriend is making a more detailed write up that will no doubt express a lot that I can't as well, so I'll link her blog page here as well.

So, as I come up on a month spent playing Fin Fin on TEO the Magic Planet every morning (apart from the days I was away from home asdkjhd) I think I have a lot of new appreciation for the game and what it accomplishes, and this blog< entry is mostly an excuse to gush about the sweet little beastie... So I guess this is a bit of a review? But don’t take it that officially, haha. More of a little “appreciation essay”.

When I started up the game I had one specific goal, and that was to get Fin Fin’s friendliness stat to maximum (this took a few days and my play sessions were pretty short, not long at all...) but the kicker is that leaving him for a day or more will cause it to decrease again, incentivizing you to keep checking back on what’s going on on TEO, which also allows you to see the changes in the environment and weather over time. Maybe one day it’s raining and one day you see some interesting cloud formations or a rainbow, and the plants in the various environments change with the seasons. It’s a pretty casual gameplay loop, but I think observation is the key part of what made me engage with the game so much. Interacting with Fin Fin is delightful (and I’m really glad that there’s an alternative to microphone controls built into the game! Not a lot of games provide that, and I am sort of uncomfortable with speaking out loud or being recorded. So having an alternate way to engage with the game’s mechanics and still get the full experience is really nice.) and it’s so cool seeing an interesting animal in the distance while that happens, or seeing Fin Fin catch a fish and carry it across the map to his nest- it makes it feel like more of a world. Did I mention that the consistency in this game is amazing? There are a lot of screen transitions and loading zones for each area in the game, but the continuity between them is carefully held. I saw Fin Fin take a Lemo fruit from me, fly across the map, and then feed that same Lemo fruit to his chick Fin Fin Jr. I’ve seen him catch a fish, fly to the Amile Forest, alight on a branch, and then eat the fish. There’s a lot that goes towards making him feel like an immersive, real creature. Fin Fin is a pretty old game, but even now I think the stated goal of creating an “artificial life” is accomplished. And his singing is beautiful!!!

It’s easy to assume the game is boring or a bit of a relic, especially if people have only seen it via the WRTV stream that caused the current “Fin Fin renaissance”, as it isn’t really a streaming-ready game. It’s difficult to realize at first what exactly you’re supposed to “do”- even despite this it’s a pretty casual and low stakes game. Fin Fin mostly keeps to himself in the beginning of the game, until you start to build up a bond, and even then he mostly takes care of himself. It’s more of a birdwatching sim than a virtual pet game, which I actually really like. The world of TEO is bigger than Fin Fin, who is just one animal in a larger ecosystem that you can only really catch fleeting glimpses of. I would argue this is actually one of Fin Fin’s strengths, especially playing the game now without any of the manuals and stuff that would come with the physical game. It feels very mysterious, which adds to the intended feeling of observing a place familiar-yet-alien. There aren’t a lot of super polished walkthroughs, gamefaqs or wikis at all, but the fansite scene is very well maintained. (Hats off to EMGE who has been running finfin.de for 22 years now! It’s my go-to site when I’m curious about something I might have seen in the game.) Nowadays we can easily find all the answers about a video game online with a click of a button, but Fin Fin, itself from an earlier era, still thrives off of the hand-made web, which I think helps to preserve the mystique of the “real computer creature” to an extent. I wouldn’t want it any other way, and I’m glad Fin Fin is my new best friend. In a sort of twist of irony, the things that would otherwise cause the game to show its age are what instead have made me consider it an enduring classic. Fin Fin on TEO the Magic Planet is more accessible than ever thanks to the Fin Fin on QEMU emulation project, so there’s no better time to give this charming little game a try.

TL;DR I have Fin Fin fever, baby!!!

Oh man oh man oh man GUESS WHO’S HOME FROM LONDON!!! I had such an amazing time but I will admit I got quite homesick. I wish I could take all the chilly weather with me, though! And all the cool old buildings :P Sorry about the long break from webmastery but I have returned...

I wrote some notes while I was on the trip after each day but these ended up being way too long so I’ll give you an abridged version here.

Day One

The flight was in the late night and was honestly super uncomfortable, I barely slept and my back hurt like hell. The snacks and stuff were nice though. Compared to some other airlines I was surprised they gave us two whole meals, I was used to getting the usual peanuts and a ginger ale. (I did still get ginger ale. It feels necessary to do that on a plane at least once.) Getting through customs was pretty seamless compared to how it is in the U.S., it was pretty much automated!

Day Two...???

When we got to London we went to get dinner (since it was the afternoon by the time we got there Because Time Zones) at a pub and got fish and chips. I promptly fell very asleep at 7 PM and slept terribly and woke up at 1 AM due to jet lag. But my first ride out of the airport on the Elizabeth Line was so magical, I kept staring out of the window at all the beautiful old buildings I saw.

On this day we went to the British Museum and oh my god that place is huge and not well air conditioned... Despite this it was probably one of my favorite things I saw on the trip, it was just fascinating. I thought it was especially cool seeing the Rosetta Stone. We also reserved a really nice lunch at the Great Court restaurant which is right at the top of the museum, it was really amazing up there. I had lots of strawberry and mango tea, a ribeye steak, and a REALLY YUMMY black currant and wine flavored panna cotta which I’m still drooling over. I also got one of two souvenirs I got on this trip, a very cute plush Bastet. They also had matching Anubis plushies but I did not get one of those regrettably. We spent pretty much the whole day at the museum so once I got home I went full relax mode and did one of those facial mask things. It was red so it looked like I got my face ripped off lol. SCARY.

Day Four

I saw two major things today: Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave (in this absolutely gorgeous cemetery) and the TATE MUSEUM which was filled with such incredible iconic paintings, oh my god. I also got to see their exhibition on the Rosettis which was really cool and interesting. It was just jaw dropping so I would definitely recommend visiting...

Day Five

This was the day we saw the absolutely incredible Tower of London. I thought the armory was really cool and I’m glad I opted to stand in line for the Crown Jewels as well, but I think the coolest part was just being around those amazing historic buildings... and the ravens!!! So cute!!! Before we went I also got one of those huge full English breakfasts which was very good. My other souvenir from the trip was a Tower of London shirt.

Day Six

On this day we rode a riverboat on the Thames and we went to tour the Cutty Sark ship, which has been converted into a really interesting museum about the history of tea trading ships. And, because of that, you can actually go to have tea at the museum right underneath the ship itself!!! And that was amazing, I’m still sort of craving the cucumber sandwiches (and clotted cream. oh my god I wish clotted cream was sold where I live. oh my goddd). After that we went to Greenwich park and saw the royal observatory museum which was one of my highlights of the trip I think. The park itself was sooo pleasant. I really do love chilly weather.

And then, in the evening, we went to see a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe Theatre. It was really fun, but I sort of wish I had seen a different play because I’ve seen this one several times already and there’s a lot of Shakespeare I’m not entirely familiar with yet. It was also sort of disappointing that the actor for Puck was out sick, and the understudy didn’t get nearly as cool costuming as the original actor was supposed to from what I can tell. Despite that I thought it was a really fun show. When we came out it was night time and seeing the city all aglow was really gorgeous, especially seeing the St. Paul’s Cathedral in the distance. We never got to visit the interior regrettably. Maybe next time?

Day Seven

On this day we went to see the Natural History museum and then I got to spend the rest of the day relaxing in the little dorm room... The museum itself was very cool, I especially liked seeing all the taxidermy. And the building was just amazing!!!!

COMING HOME!!!

The flight back was so much less unbearable and uncomfortable than the flight there and the food was better this time around as well. There were some forecasted delays that didn’t actually end up happening, so that was nice. And we got home without any issue and I slept like a rock. My cat must have missed me a lot since he was snuggling with me all through the night... What a sweetheart, I missed him too :,)

I think if there’s anything I really wish was different about this trip it’s that I wish I wasn’t taking it with my parents. I usually try to stay pretty positive on this blog but my OCD and autism makes some aspects of travel hard on me and they’re not very accommodating- and every part of the trip I can think of as “negative” is related to that. I just kept thinking to myself how much more I would be enjoying myself if I were with my girlfriend instead and had more agency over my schedule or how I could handle my OCD symptoms... Not that I didn’t enjoy the trip at all- far from it, it was genuinely incredible and I’d love to visit London again. My parents are just definitely in the “mandatory fun” school of tourism in a way that I am growing more weary of, and after spending several days basically tethered to them I really really need some space lol... I definitely need to move out as soon as I can!

Overall the trip was quite nice, though. London gets a thumbs up from me. I’ve uploaded a few pictures on my Piclog account so feel free to scroll through those.

The Cure... THE CURE!!! What can I possibly say? The concert was exactly as amazing as I’d hoped. It was nice to go to a concert where I could actually sit down, since the previous two i went to had a venue where you just had to stand the whole time :P And everyone put on a great show.

I hadn’t heard of the opening act (The Twilight Sad) before this tour so when I’m in situations like that I usually try to wait to check them out so I get totally surprised by their music when I go to see them. And their music was just beautiful, especially the singer’s voice. I’m kind of pissed my parents made me miss the start of it while they were getting pizza -_- Still I definitely want to check them out more extensively. Also, at the end of their set they pulled out a trans pride flag which was such an awesome gesture, especially considering the political climate of my state right now. I notice a lot that seeing pride flags in windows, and other stuff like that, always Hits Different for me IRL.

And The Cure themselves were AMAZING. I think having such a versatile discography always makes for an amazing show and they kept things pretty varied throughout. (they didn’t play any songs from Pornography though...? Mysterious) And many people have already said this but Smith’s voice is incredibly well preserved, he sounded incredible. SOOOOO yeah I don’t really have anything to add other than mindless gushing about how cool everything was :P I’m still in the throes of post-concert euphoria so forgive me for not having very much super insightful commentary.

Sooo, I recently downloaded Warrior Cats Untold Tales. A cute little RPGmaker fan game that I have a lot of nostalgia for! And I decided to play through it until I reached a logical "end of the story", while documenting my exploits “in character”. Untold Tales was what got me to make my first OC, so I decided to remake her for this playthrough (you might recall Moonspectrum from an earlier blog entry...) Initially my idea was to just explore, have a mate and a kit, and progress until said kit was fully grown. It got a little more interesting though, so here's a somewhat narrativized version.

Day One:

Moonspectrum is a young warrior with a passion for plants born into ThunderClan, with a silver tabby pelt. She starts out collecting lots of herbs for the medicine cat Snowheart, garnering her much reputation among her fellow ThunderClan peers. Around this time she takes an apprentice, Bluepaw, who has a dark blue coat and dark eyes; she also became mates with a dark blue tabby named Frogjaw, who frequently gifted her squirrels. Due to her frequent herb collection she is rewarded the position of Medicine Cat's assistant, allowing her to heal herself with herbs.

She continues training with Bluepaw- she took well to hunting but needed to train in combat as well, which requires the risk of getting into battle. In one climactic final battle, Bluepaw was finally fully trained, earning the name Bluelilly- this was also the battle needed to qualify Moonspectrum for deputy's assistant. The tabby is satisfied as she curls up in her bed beside her mate and her former apprentice, as leaf-fall sets into the forest territories...

(As a side note, in my original file I also had a mate with a blue pelt, though his name was Scarpelt. I thought it was cool since Scarpelt was the name the generator on the official Warriors website always gave me.)

Day Two:

A daughter is born to Moonspectrum and Frogjaw, named Wolfkit. It's business as usual for Moonspectrum, collecting many objects and toys for her new kit. And it stays like that for a little while until she wanders close to the thunderpath looking for Shiny Things and encounters a dog. It's a terrifying encounter, but the lingering scent of Twoleg really sticks with her. But she is also fairly adventurous today, exploring the other territories especially. She even encounters a Kittypet named Ember. They chat for a short while, but Moonspectrum initially does not head to twolegplace to become a Kittypet.

Leafbare arrives, and in the middle of the cold winter months, a kit named Longkit goes missing. Moonspectrum is able to find and heal the kit before something horrible happens, but it worries her, especially with little Wolfkit born into such a world. And once more, by the thunderpath, there is an encounter that causes a bit of a shift in Moonspectrum: a real Twoleg, face to face. She had never seen one before! And just a day later she came across the Twoleg camp in RiverClan territory while sneaking around. This all makes her curiouser and curiouser about what life is even like in Twolegplace.

She encounters Ember again just below the entrance to ThunderClan camp, and impulsively decides to give up a chunk of her reputation to see what it's like there, and Bluelily, who has become very close friends with her former mentor, comes as well, easily lured to have a paw in each world. She feels immense guilt at having left her kit behind to be cared for by her mate, but the eases of kittypet life are comforting- Bluelily seems to especially enjoy it.. She plays often with the kitten Fuzzy, as if to assuage that guilt, and she eventually receives a collar from Ember's housefolk. She remains there until mid-newleaf, when she decided to return to ThunderClan, still wearing the collar as a symbol of her shame at having wavered. She discovers that she missed Wolfkit's first words, and that she was greatly missed by the clan.

She goes to StarClan for guidance, or forgiveness perhaps, at the Moonstone, and seemingly is gifted with the reputation she had initally lost.

(We also purchase the "Challenge Mode" from the bonus shop, as a sort of punishment for her kittypet life. I would continue using this throughout the playthrough. Another fun note is that Wolfkit was also the name of Moonspirit's kit in my first playthrough, though she was a tom in that playthrough, and a she-cat in this one. Trans cat moment?)

Day Three:

Not much of note happens on this day, but Moonspectrum does successfully defeat a deputy and his patrol while on challenge mode, so that's something! But it's the only note I wrote, probably because I had work that day. Greenleaf arrives once more.

Day Four:

Wolfkit becomes an apprentice. Moonspectrum suffers her first near-death (aka losing all her health) on the way to commune with the Moonstone, from a WindClan patrol- Bluelily nearly gets run over on the thunderpath trying to chase them down. In a second excursion, Bluelily is killed by a WindClan cat, and Moonspectrum's heart sinks (enough for me to reload the save! We can't lose her now!). And then soon after, a WindClan patrol complete with a deputy is spotted extremely close to ThunderClan territory, and Moonspectrum fears she started a war with her attempt to travel to Mothermouth. And the deputy of ThunderClan confirmed it, that relations with WindClan had become strained. She meets with Ember again, and the recent danger that was befalling the cats she cared about tempted her to come back to her housefolk. But she refused again- for now. She witnesses an entire patrol of ShadowClan cats get run over by a monster and is again ambushed by WindClan while foraging for herbs on the RiverClan border so that she could recover her health. She narrowly escaped with just a sliver of health remaining. All this solidifies her distrust in the safety and security of the Clans. It seems like massive, hostile patrols are suddenly everywhere in the forest, as though preparing for war.

But, there is a moment of joy. Wolfpaw is named Wolffall, finally a warrior- an adult. And with Wolffall no longer needing her to be around to care for her, Moonspectrum realizes she doesn't want to be here anymore. As soon as Leaf-fall begins again, she resolves- she will return to her life as a kittypet, no more shame in her heart. For her, and for Bluelily.

She asks StarClan for guidance to solidify her decision, and she is rewarded with a bonus coin, needed to summon Ember directly to her. And coincidentally, the night before she planned to leave...

This was it. She said her farewells to her family, and then her and Bluelily set off to Twolegplace once more, finally having found peace outside of the Clans that raised them for violence.

(And yet, I’m tempted by the prospect of having her form her own rogue clan... Maybe a different playthrough sometime?)

All in all I had a lot of fun revisiting this bit of my childhood and I want to take this as an opportunity to encourage you to check out Falcon Develops (the dev)'s other projects. Cattails Wildwood Story is ramping up for release (it's in beta now) and I am incredibly excited. He also has a lot of interesting stuff on his youtube channel, including a short series on the development of Untold Tales. He's very critical of the game design in retrospect but I think the game has aged remarkably well for what it is. And I think it speaks a lot to how it builds the environment from its source material and the power of Seriousness of Play that I could spin an entire little narrative out of it.

I think I'm pretty lucky that the creators of two of my childhood favorite games, Untold Tales and WolfQuest, are still involved in game development. The first Cattails game was absolutely everything I loved in Untold Tales executed with so much more polish... And WolfQuest is still actively receiving updates and got quite a significant one very recently. I very much like this little subgenre of PC games that are like, a simulated day to day life. I don’t know, it’s nice.

And in other Gaming News I finally got around to downloading Fin Fin on QEMU, and I am very much enjoying interacting with Fin Fin so far! I wasn’t sure what level of immersion to expect but there’s a lot of subtle things that make him feel almost like a living creature. Would encourage you to check it out!

Also whoa the Cure concert is tomorrow... Definitely expect a blog entry about that.

I watched two lesbian vampire movies on Monday, one I had been meaning to watch for a little while and one that I found on a site reviewing various lesbian vampire films (linked on my Cool Links page, btw!!! It's amazing!!!) and thought looked intriguing. Here are my thoughts:

Dracula's Daughter (1936) is one of a few different Universal Dracula movies, of which I had only seen the first one (I really do need to watch more Universal tbh. I'm more of a Hammer gal overall but they have some hits). It follows the story of Countess Marya Zaleska, the daughter of Dracula, as the title implies. She wants to release herself from vampirism, and tries everything from burning and exorcising his corpse (Dracula's only appearance in this movie, btw, and he doesn't even show up onscreen- this movie is all about Marya, which I appreciated), to going to therapy (yes really). However, after she finds she can't resist her urge to homoerotically suck some blood, she resigns herself to her evil nature and begs the psychiatrist to become a vampire and live forever with her. ...And then she gets shot in the back with an arrow and dies. The end.

The ending was so underwhelming for a movie with such a fascinating setup, and I think the psychiatrist's relationship to Marya should have been set up way more to be believable, but there are some genuinely great scenes and cinematography in this film. The scene of Marya burning Dracula's corpse, praying for them both to be released from undeath and brandishing a cross she can't even look at, feels way ahead of its time in the way it's shot and presented. It's genuinely gorgeous. Also, every scene with Marya in the pitch black cloak kind of slayed. All in all it's not bad, and an interesting precursor to later sapphic vampire movies (I was surprised at how blatantly she expressed this considering this was in the Hays Code era, asking girls to get undressed before killing them and everything lol), but left me wanting more.

However, La Morte Vivante/The Living Dead Girl (1982) is definitely one of the best of this little subgenre, and deserves to be discussed more. Basically, after her crypt is raided, the dead woman Catherine Valmont is awoken from death, and is afflicted with a need to kill and drain blood, and left mute and amnesiac. She begins to recover her memories as she finds her way back to her old house, and is eventually found by her childhood friend/lover Helene- who's all too willing to kill innocent people to keep Catherine fed. And it is amaaaazing. As Catherine grows aware of how horrifying her existence is, as she tries to resist it, Helene indulges more and more in the killing. The monster becomes human; the human becomes a monster, and it all ends with them eating each other alive both literally and metaphorically. This movie has everything. It has sapphic blood pacts, homoerotic vampire cannibalism, a spooky castle a melancholic tone, Cool Dove Imagery, bright red blood, and did I mention LESBIANS??? I especially like the scenes of Catherine wandering through her childhood bedroom, the scene where Helene tries to offer the dead dove to her (a vampire movie where animal blood isn't just an easy copout? Unheard of!), as well as the scene where Helene is killing the woman she lured into the crypt while Catherine begged her not to. It's all so good???

In a lot of lesbian vampire horror there's this focus on one girl being a pursuer and one girl being a victim- the vampire's sapphic desires being imposed on the victim being "part of the horror". La Morte Vivante isn't like this; neither girl is a victim, and they loved each other long before Catherine died and reanimated. There's so much passion and tenderness to it, too- Helene is determined to nurture and care for her in her amnesiac state, and Catherine, even at her most monstrous, never ever wants to attack or hurt Helene. They really do care for each other, which makes the mutual destruction of the ending even more heartwrenching. It feels like a horror movie that just happens to focus on lesbian characters, and I really liked it!!! Watch it now!!!!

Well, the social media side of it, anyway. Reddit mods are on strike, Tumblr continues its quest to monetize every single thing on their website while Tumblr Live looms ominously over the dashboard, Discord forced its recent username change (which is silly, I think part of the appeal was not having to come up with a username that hadn’t been taken lol), Twitter is a burning wreckage, Facebook is Facebook (ew), YouTube is ad/censorship hell (they all are tbh), etc etc etc. I’ve seen a lot of doomposting about it on Tumblr so I think now’s as good a time as ever to promote the personal/small/indie/whatever web (I’VE BEEN TRYING MY BEST)...

Every so often when there’s some kind of scare like this I see people promoting whatever social media replacement is hot off the presses (Mastodon, Cohost, Pillowfort, etc etc) but I am personally of the opinion that trying to replace social media with more social media is a bit useless... I think we might be witnessing the downfall of social media as we know it in real time (or at least I hope so). I hope people realize they’re tired of visiting the same 5-7 websites and pacing around like a sad zoo animal. (also I can’t help but lol at everyone calling tumblr the last bastion of the old web. I mean, come on). I absolutely love this side of the web. Browsing other people’s personal sites on this side of the ‘net makes me feel as happy and curious as I did when I was a kid sneaking onto the computer at midnight because the internet was so captivating to me. I think we really have something special here.

I don’t know. Whenever the concept of enshittification/the trust thermocline comes up I can’t help but briefly hyperfixate on it. How long until the straw really does break the camel’s back? But I really do get the sense that the internet is currently in flux. I think things are going to shift over the next few years.

That's just my take on it, anyway.

So! I played two games recently, after seeing them linked on a blog due to their use of Geocities-esque aesthetics. So I thought I might as well review them, and link them as well since I found them really intriguing works of art.

The first is "Black Room", by Cassie McQuater- a "feminist dungeon crawler" about a person with insomnia falling asleep at their computer. It's a bit of a weird, layered thing, repurposing endless spritesheets of video game characters, fantastical gifs, dreamlike backgrounds, and so on, while using the browser itself as the interface to interact with it. Playing it without any context as to the authorial intention was a very surreal experience. It was strange, and extremely captivating. I already have it linked on my Cool Links page, but I'll link it here as well. I'd strongly recommend playing it before reading further- my main regret is not playing it at night when I was half asleep.

Something I quite liked about it is how the surreal imagery of the way you interact with it builds up, layer by layer. The first section of the game involves controlling the protagonist with arrow keys, a familiar setup for a game; the next section chronicles a game the narrator's mother taught them to aid in falling asleep- the titular black room, in which the browser mechanics are introduced- each "level" passed by finding the hidden objects in the room reveals another fragment of the story. After this, the player finds themself in a series of colorful "black rooms" populated by female demons and monsters, clicking on each reveals another fragment of a fragment of a memory.

Each page itself is a twisted collection of graphics and links, leading you to "strange visions" and mazes and other mysterious rooms. I quite liked the "Jennifer's Quest" rooms, and I was really intrigued by the "end goal" being to crawl into a box (rewarding you with a page of peaceful imagery). The strange visions I think are pretty fascinating too, especially knowing the intent behind them, with female video game characters that have been subject to misogyny or sexualization in their source material being allowed to exist in their own eerie, beautiful worlds, on their own terms, effectively "reclaimed". And I was kind of fascinated by "Sonia's Room" and the refrain of "You'll be a woman soon"... The title in the page browser being "Hostage" just gave me chills, I don't know! But it only gave more power to the fact that this character always frees herself without player input- the player must follow her to the exit. It's something I kind of relate to, it's kind of a bittersweet feeling caring so much for characters who were envisioned mostly as props for the assumed-male audience. This hits especially hard for me in combination with how much Black Room loves using Castlevania sprites, since it's a series I absolutely love even as I'm aware that like 90% of the women in it are "dead wives" or not allowed to have their own story. They're characters I've "reclaimed" for myself as well... I don't know, it just feels like A Lot.

I said before that each page is a collection of graphics and links... That leads to another thing I liked about it... This is websurfing! It's the opposite of what’s considerd standard web design- pushed as far as it can go into the realm of the fantastical. The browser is the interface, and still more aspects of the game use the web as a medium as a message. Even the key smashy URL lends itself to being shared, as the creator has pointed out- as a strange, secret of the web.

It culminates with the narrator transforming into a demoness themself, flying away to join with their lost sisters. I interpreted this a few different ways- finally falling asleep (a "demon of the night", finally completing the transition into sleep- this game is about insomnia, after all); that concept of feminist reclamation, finding joy in the monstrous, making yourself untouchable; of finally embracing the memories of the past. It could even be a passage into adulthood... It's everything. The final vision, countless demons and succubi alighting into a starry sky, is hauntingly beautiful.

Black Room gets 5 stars from me. It just hits right.

"Wrong Box" is a bit more of a nostalgic work than Black Room is, and much shorter. When I opened it up I was kind of expecting it to be a LSD Dream Emulator-like where you surf through an endless loop of 3D levels based on various websites, but it actually does have a linear narrative. The protagonist finds their old computer and browses through old sites they used to visit, formatted as strange 3D levels, messaging old friends who forgot to uninstall their old chat client, visiting MySpace pages, being flooded with weird popup ads, and did I mention the GIFS!!!!!!! SO MANY GIFS!!!!!

Eventually you find yourself talking to a cute monster, which very much seemed to me like it may have been a drawing by the protagonist from back in those days, as it does kind of remind me of the art I made as a teenager. You’re then tasked with finding three mixtapes in three different levels (MySpace, a forum full of people who believe in fairies, and a quiz site). I didn’t quite understand what I was supposed to do in the MySpace section at first, seeing as it tells me to “copy-paste code” into a page editor- I immediately thought, oh, I need to code all this myself!!! rofl, then I got frustrated when I couldn’t. But you actually find the code necessary to help the Dollz character change her page background on another person’s page, which is kind of fun but I think it would have been really interesting mechanically (and a statement about the freedom of the personal web) to just let everyone write whatever in the code... but also definitely near-impossible to pull off. IDK, I was never a MySpace kid, so this was probably the part that hit with me the least, but it was still fun.

The quiz level was pretty short and I don’t have much to say about it, but “How Random Are You” being the quiz name is really funny to me. I remember those lol...

I think the fairy forum was my favorite of the three levels. There’s something kind of beautiful about reading all these scattered posts, all full of hope and belief, while the things they believed in all flit and flutter around you. And you must read every post, take in everything they have faith in, to reach the level’s mixtape. I also like the detail of the fairies disappearing after you look at them directly, a fleeting joy. I don’t know, I liked it. I used to read those kinds of websites and try to convince myself I could turn myself into a werewolf as long as I had the right spell...

After collecting all three Mix CD’s, you’ve beaten the game, and hmm... I find myself wishing this game was longer! And surely you’re doing something right if I want more of what you’re giving me, lol. But I think that length is kind of an important factor to truly adapt that feeling of surfing through endless, endless links... I had the urge throughout the game to click on various links that just weren’t part of the game and were instead decorative or meant to just simulate the layout of the site, and I wasn’t allowed to click them. I’m not saying that this game should have built an ENTIRE INTERNET, but I do feel like some more could have been put in to make it truly feel like websurfing (this is something I think Black Room excels at).

I do quite like the detail that when the game “loops” and you find yourself back at the desk with the computer, there’s a phone laying there, scrolling through a feed forever- reality and the present catching up to you after having witnessed all the untamed magic of this world. Which will you choose?

My thoughts on Wrong Box overall are that it’s a pretty fun 15 minute game but I just want MORE omg. I want to explore more memories, more websites, more. And it must say something that I liked it so much it made me for hunger for more of it... lol. I think the shadow of the passage of time throughout the game is its most compelling element: countless friends lists filled with people who haven’t been online in a decade; worlds that have been forgotten, pages long abandoned. It is an invitation to come back, even the game itself encourages you to share it and pass it on. I guess I’m doing my part now!

Also, I should really finally get around to playing Hypnospace Outlaw at some point, huh?

I’ve been in kind of a weird place regarding blogging lately- or any productive creative output. Which kind of sucks!!! I like making little updates about my life but everything feels very rote and mundane lately. I like making money but damn I miss being unemployed...

So I’m kind of thinking about shifting the focus of the blog away from IRL stuff unless something super interesting happens, I guess? Maybe I’ll post about movies or games more often. (Still loving Tears of the Kingdom, btw! I did fully upgrade my horse, and now my main focus is on building a house... I just need 2 more rooms to complete my layout :D)

I also wish I had more cool ideas for pages on my site. It feels like it’s been a while since I made a huger substantial update (and the total loss of my music page makes me really sad. SCMPlayer, RIP...) but at the same time I kind of like the state it’s in currently. I won’t try to force it, but it’s just part of how I feel so restless and shitty when I’m not making some kind of art project. Oh well.

My main hope is that once I get used to the work schedule I’ll get back into the swing of things. I don’t know how younger me even managed to squeeze in art in the middle of a school week lol.

Honestly? Wasn’t that bad. Making subs is actually kind of fun. I do well at tasks that involve clear instructions and completing tasks. So, I have made quite a few subs and got hands on experience; I feel comfortable driving in my car and just generally feel hopeful about my future.

Oh yeah AND... I got Tears of the Kingdom. Fun game! I love BOTW and I was so happy that my trusted horse Dandelion could come along in the sequel. I am a bit of a horse girl at heart so my main priorities with this game are finding all the stables, getting every pony point reward, getting Malanya to upgrade all of Dandelion’s stats, etc... Plot stuff can wait! This is more important!

It’s been a while, huh! I told myself I would hold off on writing another post until the week was over since basically everything was happening. First: Sunday. I test-drove the car, was pretty satisfied with it.

Monday: I watched movies with my girlfriend.

Tuesday: I went to go do paperwork for my job, had lunch with my girlfriend afterward at the park. Then in the evening I went to an 100 Gecs concert, which I totally thought was later in the month lol. It was a ton of fun. It was in the same place I saw Molchat Doma, and someone gave me a cute beaded bracelet. I have strangely little to say about it, but trust me it was awesome.

Wednesday: Taking the car home! And paperwork at the DMV. That went pretty smoothly.

Thursday: My first real drive in my new car. I went to my volunteer work at the stables in it and got boba on the way home. I haven’t practiced driving alone in a while but I think I did pretty well.

And finally... Friday. I had my online orientation for my job. Which was pretty laid back and simple, plus I’m getting paid to attend it. But the bad news is that my car somehow got stuck on anti-theft immobility when I tried to take it for a drive today. There are ways to fix it of course and I suspect that it’s a result of how old it is, some parts could be worn out, if the answers I found online are to be believed. I also have to redo my drug test- not because of any drugs or anything, something just went wrong with it, apparently. So, that’s tomorrow. At least all my problems right now are pretty fixable (I hope! I really hope the car problem isn’t too major.) And for the most part everything is looking up.

Edit 5/15/23- the car problem has been fixed pretty easily and I did retake the drug test. Wish me luck on my first day on wednesday :)

WELL! I did a second job interview at another location of the same grocery store. And they gave me a job offer right away. What luck! I’m going to be a deli worker, with a nice $17 per hour to start with... I’m a little nervous since I haven’t seriously worked before but I’m optimistic. My tarot reading this month told me to trust in fate and that I’ll need to adjust to a new normal- and opportunity and success may be in my future. So! That seems promising.

I’m also finally test driving a car later today :) The previous car owner who was offering one to me kind of flaked out in the end likely due to the condition of the car (Not Very Good). But with any luck the one I’m trying out today will be mine shortly.

Lots of good news today! I’ll keep you posted.

Just in case anyone hasn’t heard, Dracula Daily has begun! Basically, this is a way to follow the various journal entries and letters sent in the book in real time, as it’s an epistolary novel. I greatly enjoy following the story this way last year and definitely intend to do it again.

This year, though, I’m following the new audio adaptation Re:Dracula. I’ve always been a fan of audio books and audio plays and it will be a fun way to re-experience everything in a new way. Definitely subscribe if you haven’t yet... I’ve added links to Dracula Daily and Re:Dracula to the Cool Links page.

Not a huge update, but I am quite pleased to notice that I now have more than 500 individual visitors to my website! I’ve only had this place for a little over two months, but it’s already come so far :)

Thanks everyone!

Also, I got a piclog account. I currently have it displayed in my Treasure Chest, but I’m wondering if there’s a better place for it. I’ll figure something out eventually lol.

I'm a bit late to the party since the movie came out a while ago, but I greatly enjoyed Renfield. It's a goofy romp with fun lighting, lots of references to Dracula media, and most importantly it is a camp masterpiece.

The horror elements are fun, and the gore is video game levels of absurd. Heads exploding, arms ripped or sliced off, all sorts of things. Nic Cage as Dracula is surprisingly great (nothing dethrones Christopher Lee in my heart though). I'm not a huge comedy fan but the jokes were also good! It surprised me (“Thank you Wiccan Tumblr!” killed me). Renfield himself is an endearing character. By the time he was finally standing up to Dracula, I was really cheering for him. I think it was interesting how since the setting is very modernized, instead of in a mental asylum he goes to a therapy group instead, an interesting reflection of how much psychiatry and representation of mentally ill characters has changed (don't love how narcissist is used as a synonym for abuser but that's its own conversation- not all progress is linear). I was much less keen on the vampire hunting cop Rebecca Quincey but the crime and drama aspects of the movie were entertaining enough and the fight scenes, again, had very fun gore and action. It's definitely a movie you should see with a friend or companion though, it elevates the experience. (I got the treat of getting a whole empty theatre to watch it in with my girlfriend! It’s a movie perfect for riffing on)< I think generally there’s a niche for fun mid-budget films that hasn’t been filled, and Renfield could have fit into that niche- a shame it seems to have bombed :(

So like... 4 out of 5 stars, I think.

Super excited to see The Last Voyage of the Demeter in August as well. 2023, like every year, is the year of DRACULA!!!! But especially so since we have two movies this year focusing on the story from mostly unexplored perspectives. I'm eager to see how it goes. Also, I have a job interview today... Let’s see how that goes, too.

Also, I'm considering phasing out the "Essays" page and just posting everything on here instead...? IDK, I feel more inclined to post on one large BLOG PAGE!!! than make individual pages for everything that's slightly longish.

EDIT: I have done this. Also finished my interview. Fingers crossed!

Wow, it’s been a whole week since I posted something. Is it just me or did my luck turn around quite suddenly? First I finally get selected for a job interview (wish me luck, it’s on thursday!) Then a family friend offers to inexpensively sell me a car. I had been wanting a car for a while so this is super exciting. Then my uncle offered to gift me a laptop, which I had also been needing. Especially since my current computer is a shared desktop. All of this is hugely beneficial in working towards my goal to move out at some point in the near future.

I also finally went to the goth club again. It was even more fun the second time. While we were in line someone from security pulled me and my girlfriend aside and let us in early through another entrance because we were a party of two, which was cool. And she complimented my outfit! So that definitely put a smile on my face last night... People were also small-talking to us more than they did last time. I feel like that’s how you eventually make friends, right? lol

AND, one last thing: after seeing Nuovo Testamento open for Molchat Doma, I then found out they’re coming back to my area in several months- for a whole goth/darkwave music festival!!!! Isn’t that amazing? I already have my tickets for all three days. So I definitely have a lot to look forward to.

If you recall back in February I mentioned getting tickets to see Molchat Doma in concert- that was last night! And it was awesome. I’m not a huge concert-goer but I had a great time and danced a lot, and regret wearing heels (yes, again ;^_^)

The opener was very good- I hadn’t heard of them before, they’re a band called Nuovo Testamento. Would recommend< looking into them, because oh my god they were amazing. The venue was outdoors which was kind of cool because it almost felt like a secret party tucked away in an alleyway, or something. I don’t know, there was just kind of an atmosphere going on.

Anyway, does anyone else think the people who do lighting for live events deserve more recognition? I certainly think so. It really elevated the experience.

I'm in a great mood because I had such a good day yesterday! I went to get lunch at a ramen place with my girlfriend and even though we shared one bowl we had enough to each take home leftovers, so that's lunch for today, haha. The spicy broth is so tasty. I also tried takoyaki for the first time, and we got Thai tea and boba.

After lunch we went to a local park, and got to see their rehabilitated birds of prey and we also fed the turtles in their pond :) It's a place I always used to visit when I was younger but I hadn't been in a while, so it was nice to just go walking together and see everything.

I'm still not having any luck with finding jobs I can apply for offline, but I guess I'll have to suck it up eventually. I just don't like how I only get radio silence.

In better news I finished up the birthday present for my girlfriend. It's a secret though!

Bleh. I kind of hate how every job expects you to apply online and wade through a bunch of broken links on their websites. I’d prefer just to fill out a paper form if anything. Every online application I send gets ghosted and it’s really demoralizing that I don’t even get a response.

It feels so intimidating to actually try to get in anywhere, meanwhile the employers are probably the same people who complain about how no one wants to work these days. (in one particular example there was literally nowhere TO apply on the website they directed me towards…)

I mean, at least respond to my e-mails. It just feels like there’s nothing to be done and I don’t like it at all. And then people get on your case about being unemployed (I literally do volunteer work and I do TRY so it’s not like I’m just lazy…)

I guess I’ll figure something out eventually but it really did dampen a lot of my optimism.

Happy April! Can guarantee there will be no April Fools jokes on my website, because I simply don’t have any ideas :P

For today’s blog post I decided I should probably discuss my thoughts on the concepts of fate and destiny, since I finally made an About Me page recently and listed tarot as one of my “likes”. I’m generally a skeptic when it comes to paranormal things (for example, I don’t believe in ghosts, or most things like that) so my recent interest in tarot/divination can seem incongruous with that. My interest began in part because I got a deck and a guide book as gifts, but also because I find it helpful for making decisions. (plus, let’s be realistic: everyone thinks that doing magic is kind of cool.)

I don’t think tarot cards literally can tell the future. However, I do think that they can get me in the right mindset to face it, and “equip” me for what’s to come. When I do readings (which I try to remember to do before every new month begins) I usually find whatever’s on my mind or has me feeling conflicted reflected back at me. For example, if I feel hesitant to do something I know I might enjoy, I usually end up pulling a card that is telling me not to hesitate, and to move forward (this is actually what convinced me to stop putting off going to a club for the first time lol… but it sounds so silly when I write it here!). It’s fairly consistent, and I think in part that’s because the meanings are just vague-specific enough to apply to whatever I’m dealing with. So, it’s sort of like a “focus” to me. I’m not literally telling the future, but rather by pondering it, it helps me to choose the most beneficial path. Like, say, I’m not sure if I should apply to a specific job, and then I get a reading that tells me I’m at a crossroads but there could be prosperity in my future… It’s easy to glean a meaning from that and make a choice based on the information provided.

So, yeah. I guess I just find it helpful? Almost as a psychological tool.

Also, some more general life updates: I deleted the Tumblr app from my phone. I explained this on Tumblr itself: this was merely a way to break the infinite-scrolling hypnosis of the app, lol. I’ll still be using the website, of course I also started reading The Vampire Lestat since I finished Interview With The Vampire some weeks ago.

I’ve finally visited my local goth club and I had a great time :D I had been wanting to for a while but I think it’s easy to get in your own head about things. I was worried about dancing with a bunch of other people, worried about the long drive over, worried about if I’d enjoy myself… But once I got on the dancefloor everything just slipped away and I had a great time dancing with my girlfriend.

We did hit the unfortunate snag of arriving in the area about an hour before opening time lol. I won’t doxx myself or anything but the club is in a city with some interesting historic displays and stuff, so we looked around for a bit before lining up. Like I said, I was nervous as I went in… Just soaking up the ambiance helped alleviate that a lot, not to mention a lot of danceable music. It was mostly on the darkwave and industial side of things which is about what I expected. (Also love the high amount of comfy chairs they had in the corner lol). It was just really nice being “in the moment” and not really thinking about anything other than what I was experiencing.

TL;DR I had a great time and would go again.

Also, my OOE shrine page is nearly done, I just need to get the dialogue page all up and running which is going to take forever, so I'm holding off until I have a whole day to myself to work on that.

Alright, so the most exciting thing that happened to me on spring break was actually shortly before I left- managed to secure tickets to see The Cure on their new US tour- and it seems like I was just about the only person who had any luck dealing with the arcane mystery that is Ticketmaster's website, lol. If you haven't been following the whole Robert Smith vs. Ticketmaster debacle, I will just say it is quite something. I spent some time with my grandmother like I usually do this time of year, and it was nice (and I saw some manatees!), but other than that there's not much to write about. I've been itching to get back to posting things on my site, as well as get working on an Order of Ecclesia shrine page that I've been dreaming up for the past week or so. No promises on when that will be finished, but I am working on making all the text content I want to put on there before I start actually coding the pages ;)

100 visitors to my humble homepage! I’m so happy. Though I probably won’t ever know the true number of visitors to my page, seeing as my site was already in full swing before I added FC2 counter to my page, the fact that 100 different people have already visited my little personal site is really lovely. I hope everyone enjoyed their visit and will continue to check back.

Thank you :D

So, I got thinking about Scratch again.

I guess in the last couple of months something I’ve been thinking about is how there are less kid-oriented spaces online. The best example I’ve seen passed around is how the Barbie website used to have games and activities for their target demographic and now redirects to a product page. “Kids’ spaces online” is a concept very near and dear to my heart, since I was someone who played those MMOs like Animal Jam and Pixie Hollow and so on.

But there was another place targeted at kids, one I spent most of my afternoons browsing and one that a lot of people don't remember. That was Scratch, a simple programming platform created by MIT. I have so many memories on there. I wasn’t allowed to have headphones so I remember staying up till my parents fell asleep so I could sneak on the computer and watch all those Warrior Cats AMVs and games- with sound!! It felt so impressive at the time, with my cheap speakers at about 1% volume just in case my parents were woken up by a super-compressed version of Numb by Linkin Park (if you know that Scourge AMV, you know). I spent years as an active user on there when I was very young, and I remember creating my own ambitious games back in the day. I shared lots of art on there, too, since I was scared off by deviantArt’s age restrictions.

I haven’t set foot there in years.

I guess I just kind of outgrew it, it is a website for kids after all, and also just... Still being active on an account where things you made when you were 9 or so feels kind of weird just in general, lol. But nostalgia is a funny thing. I wanted to go back, just one more time. Maybe it’s because I’m now active on a different programming platform with an orange cat as a mascot lmao, but something got me thinking about those days on Scratch, when there was truly nothing holding back my creativity. I didn’t know what cringe meant. I could just be myself. Make my silly OCs and animations and attempts at “multiplayer wolf games” that never really ended up working, but were fun just the same. It was my first exposure to real online friends, or anything like social media.

Truly, when I got into middle school and someone told me what a “Mary Sue” was, it kind of killed all that. Making OCs and not really knowing what being “cringe” meant, I mean. I remember putting my main Warriors OC into that one Springhole Mary Sue quiz and I was never that unrestrained again. Even now, I feel hounded by my own shame when I create some particularly indulgent things. I’m not blaming the IRL friend who told me, because even if we knew each other for a year they were a very important friend in my life, and I would have found out about Mary Sues eventually- I’m blaming the concept.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m nostalgic for before I felt any shame for harmless bad art. I miss that bygone era.

But Scratch still exists. Why not revisit it?

So my goals for this little nostalgia project are this:

1. Revisit my old self. 2. Revisit the projects by others of my era that I remember finding so impressive. 3. Find out what the Scratch users of today are creating. 4. Create something new on the site, even if it's simple.

TO CONFRONT THE SELF

So, the first thing I did was search up my old username. Every project I ever made was preserved as though in amber. Though the UI of the website’s homepage is different, I was extremely pleased to see that the top bar is mostly the same.

One of my first projects I revisited was a “fake multiplayer” game about wolves who put out fires. Rather than doing evil black magic to get past Scratch’s limitations, I created NPC wolves who would move around the game world at random and use the fake “chat” function.

This is kind of impressive, actually? Like, don’t get me wrong, the gameplay is kind of nothing- you just touch water to collect it, and if a fire shows up and you have water, touching it will put the water out. There’s a death system that temporarily turns you into a ghost if you lose your health. Half the time the “other players” get to the fire before you do, though. Still, I remember being really proud of it at the time and spent some time playing my own game just for fun.

A lot of the most memorable things I remember creating are wolf adventuring games, though I also created similar games about lions, cats, and so on. Often there was an emphasis on sating your character’s hunger and thirst, and interacting with other NPCs.

I also had a lot of OCs. Like, a looooot of them.

I guess I kind of expected when I looked at my old stuff, to find some sort of revelation. But a lot of the games and art I created were just... okay. I mean, obviously, I was like 9 years old. But for a 9 year old it wasn’t too bad, and I kind of miss being able to create art like that without really thinking about it. I don’t make OCs anymore, really. I have only one of them, and I’m already sort of done with her story.

Still, the warm memories were there, of having the Scratch website open on Firefox and having my schoolwork open on Internet Explorer during class so i could easily switch and not get caught, of whispering over that cool Warriors AMV my friend and I had watched the previous afternoon at home, of posting obsessively on the Scratch forums. Of finding out about games like WolfQuest and Warriors Untold Tales via other Scratch users and deeply craving to play them but being too much of a weenie to try and download something without my parents’ permission. (I still play WolfQuest, and am eagerly awaiting Falconstar's next game...) Of roleplaying in the comments of “Studios”. Of making janky animations set to iNSaNiTY by Circus-P.

Something that does kind of sadden me, though, is I stopped making games around the same time that I first internalized the idea of cringe. Gradually my Scratch account became mostly a vehicle for posting art, before I abandoned it entirely. I mean, that’s kind of sad, right? It’s a programming website. If I had stuck with it, maybe I would have gotten into HTML and other programming skills a lot earlier than I had. I mean, not that Scratch’s building blocks are necessarily effective at teaching you other programming languages, they’re pretty basic... But I still wonder.

And like... Looking at my old projects, I found a bunch of comments from my own account on some of my old games, saying “wow, I was so cringe when I made this” or “This is edgy” and stuff like that. It’s kind of weird to think about but I absolutely hated myself as a preteen and would deface my old artwork in my notebooks and stuff. It wasn’t really healthy. A lot of this behavior also started when I got diagnosed with autism... I don’t think I ever consciously thought that I had to “stop being cringe” to compensate for my neurodivergence, but it sure feels like that’s what it was. Around that time I had started wading into other corners of the internet, and this was an era where “lol autism lol autistic screeching” was considered to be comedic genius.

I don’t know. It’s just sad. And what broke my heart the most was coming back and seeing people in the comments of my original page wondering what happened to me, where I had gone. I had left part of myself behind.

TO CONFRONT THE PAST

Once I had been finished with that little trip down memory lane, though, it was time to look up other people’s projects, and that’s where I hit my first obstacle.

There’s no way to search based on date. Additionally, the search function is infinite scroll. *Brilliant.* Ideally I would’ve liked to have some kind of “before:2015” search so I could easily find old stuff I remembered, but such is life. But then I remembered the “favorites” page on my account. This is like, a huge list of every project you “favorite”, then featured and linked on your own account. If there was a surefire way to find things I used to enjoy, this was it. And it worked! I found all the weird lolsorandom spoofs I remember quoting constantly with my friends back in the day, every AMV by a particular animator I idolized at the time, all the amateur games I found endlessly entertaining. I’m still impressed to this day, honestly. A lot of these people were barely any older than I was.

I saw someone comment that an animation made in 2012 that I had watched back then was “made two years before they were born”, and that was when I felt truly old.

But something else caught my attention. People were commenting on old projects calling them “cringe”. Like, really recently. The same projects I thought were so brilliantly made, the same I had aspired to create. The things I idolized, created by fellow children. They were cringe now. That’s when I felt truly ancient. A lot of older inactive accounts had descriptions like “Hey, this account is dead now and it’s super cringe don’t look at it”... Just like me.

Another thing that saddened me was that some things were just lost to time. The projects wouldn’t load when I tried to play them. This was kind of rare, but a few times it happened to things I had very vivid memories of, which was disappointing. Still, for the most part, it was just as I left it, like a little time capsule.

So that’s the Scratch of then, the Scratch I remember, a place filled with lolsorandom Warrior Cats and wolves and unrestrained creativity, all made by children. What is it like today?

TO CONFRONT THE PRESENT

So, the next question is how I’m going to gauge the atmosphere of current-day Scratch if I myself am not an active user. The easiest way would be to probably take a look through the featured projects on the homepage.

The first one was a wolf-themed dress-up game. It was a little small and simple but the art looked exactly like something I could have seen back in the day, all pixelly and anime-inspired. There was also a Kiki’s Delivery Service themed point-and-click game. The artwork was extremely polished, but the gameplay was more simple than I would have liked. Thirdly, there was another game about a bug climbing ropes, which I also found pretty fun.

I also took a look at the “what the community is loving” tab. I played one of these popular games and enjoyed it, but was kind of surprised by the prevalence of a large animation that played in the corner showing the viewer how to like and favorite the project.

I mean... That’s kind of weird isn’t it? Advertising, I mean. I never remembered that being much of a thing other than creators saying “please favorite this if you liked it” in the instructions. Anyway, these popular projects seemed to get somewhere between 50k-100k views.

I once again kind of wish I could search by most recent, so I could get an idea of how Warriors fans use Scratch, since that’s been almost a throughline of this little diary entry. But then it hit me- search a character who’s a more recent addition to the series. I opted to look for Shadowsight and Bristlefrost, two of the main characters of The Broken Code. And I got results. There were MAPs being hosted, animations and drawings being made- except nowadays it was all to popular TikTok songs instead of Linkin Park and Evanescence. The newer art is also a lot less anime-esque, and there’s a lot less crazy emo hair now. There are also a lot more MAP projects being made than full blown AMVs by one person, which I also think is reflected by the wider Warriors community on youtube as well, same with the stylistic shift. I think it’s kind of cool, actually, how you can just tell how things changed over the years.

I guess I’m just glad people are still active and kids are still making stuff. If there’s really any conclusions to be drawn here, it’s that you should be kind to people who are just now dabbling in creative artwork, and you should be kind to yourself- even the most “cringe” parts of you. Furthermore, it’s that online spaces for children to be themselves should always exist, no matter what, and I’m glad Scratch is still alive and kicking.

TO EMBRACE CREATION

My first roadblock came when I realized I had no way to make Scratch’s sprite editor work with my drawing tablet. An ominous omen to be sure. My second roadblock was that it had been a few hours since I had set up my account and I still hadn’t been given my verification email, which was necessary to share projects. Foreboding!

Still, I buckled in and animated something by mouse. What I made was a redesigned version of my original OC, henceforth named Moonspectrum. She is honestly even more of a sparklecat than the original OC was, but that’s sort of what she represents. Eventually my account was confirmed, too.

I wanted to make something that the old me would be over the moon about, complete with corny nightcore rock music. So I did.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/815875170/

THE END

So, for a few years on Tumblr, I’ve seen a lot of posts to the effect of “I used to read a lot as a kid but now I can barely sit down to read a chapter” passed around as jokes. I laughed along at first but the more time passes the more it discomforts me that I relate to this sentiment. It checks out, though, since apparently statistically people are reading less and have shorter attention spans. I recognize myself in these jokes and it worries me, especially since reading is such an important skill...

Obviously I do still read books- two years ago I reread the entire main Warriors series around the beginning of summer and I was averaging about two books a day, and then the year after I did a similar project rereading Guardians of Ga’hoole, but lately I’ve developed a particular habit of picking up a book and getting halfway through before dropping it… To say nothing of how the books I do tend to finish being written with preteens in mind. (What can I say? The allure of children’s xenofiction is strong!) Pretty recently I tried to pick up Gideon the Ninth since I heard good things about it, but I kind of bounced off of it after a few chapters. Now, this isn’t only because of my attention span being shorter- I wasn’t really clicking with the snarky tone- but it isn’t the only book I dropped recently.

I’m trying to pick up reading again, and a few days ago I downloaded a PDF (pirated , sorry :P) of Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice and I’ve been trying to read around 50 pages of the PDF per day. Can I just say what a relief> it is that I HAVEN’T been struggling with hitting that goal!? I had been intrigued with the idea of reading it due to having enjoyed the movie adaptation and I’m surprised at just how much was kept faithful between the two versions- while also getting nice surprises that weren’t adapted to film, like the encounters with the more genre-typical “old world vampires”, which I greatly enjoyed reading as a fan of vampire fiction in general... My last stopping point was after Louis and Claudia attended the vampire theatre- it feels so nice to be reading and engaging with something again without feeling like it’s an uphill battle to finish my goal for the day.

I don’t really have any specific conclusions or a stylish wrap-up or anything to draw from this other than the hope that I keep regaining my love of reading. I remember I got in trouble for reading TOO MUCH in class when I was younger and didn’t have social media or a phone to distract me... Oh, how the mighty fell, lol. As an aside, if anyone has any suggestion for books with animal protagonists aimed at an older audience than stuff like Warriors, Guardians of Ga’hoole, Watership Down, etc… Please let me know, I’d absolutely be all over it.

I felt the urge to update my blog a bit but I have work later so I decided to bang out a quick, unorganized list of movies I really like. You know, for anyone curious about that kind of thing.

Adolescence of Utena (1999) - My favorite movie ever (don’t watch this one without the context of the original show though, because you kind of need to to understand the symbolic language it’s using). I was grinning so hard when I watched it the first time, it’s so cathartic and beautiful and needs to be experienced by everyone. Every time I think I have it figured out, there’s something else I notice about it, and my appreciation for it only deepens.

Suspiria (1977) - I had the pleasure of watching this one in my local historic theatre that regularly does showings of older movies (it was built in ’26!) and let me tell you, watching this one on the upper balcony of an old picture palace really enhances the atmosphere of it, it just immediately hooked me. I love how this movie uses color and ambiance and oh my god the SOUNDTRACK!!! It’s so vibrant and beautiful and utterly terrifying (shoutout to the scene where the guide dog was barking at nothing in that massive plaza, paranoia-based horror always gets me). A must-watch. I haven’t seen the remake yet.

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) - My favorite Hammer Dracula film (yes, really!). It’s like, exactly the high level of camp I love. Lots of fake blood and silly 70s “how do you do fellow kids” dialogue and questionable outfit decisions and a guy called Johnny Alucard. There’s a scene where Peter Cushing is like, slowly rearranging the letters of “Alucard” to form “Dracula” in the most overly serious way possible. It’s wonderful.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) - OKAY HEAR ME OUT I know this is kind of an awful adaptation of the book and the way it treats its female characters Isn’t Great and it’s the origin point of everyone thinking Mina and Dracula were in love, but like… It’s such a stylish movie. The costuming and effects and everything make it a fun enough watch for me to forgive that :P

Nope (2022) - You’ve probably already heard all the overwhelming praise for this one- it’s all true. This movie is incredible. I mentioned before that paranoia-based horror always gets to me, and this is no exception. I love how it uses fear of open spaces and broad daylight. The themes of exploitation and spectacle are also very well implemented. Also can I just say that kitschy theme parks are such an underrated horror setting? More of that PLEASE.

The Thing (1982) - My girlfriend’s favorite movie :3 I’m kind of obsessed with how the movie stays so terrifying while also breaking the “don’t show the monster too quickly” rule, you know? Also the practical effects are awesome. You’ve probably already watched this one but it’s good.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971) - Another one I’d say is more appealing for its atmosphere than its plot. Also warning this is one of those like, overly horny gay vampire movies from the 70s (with all that implies).

The Vampire Lovers (1970) - See above. This one is Hammer’s Carmilla adaptation.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) - One of the best silent horror films. I absolutely love the set design.

Filibus (1915) – Another silent film, this one is about a jewel-thief who is a master of disguise- including gender. A surprisingly good-for-its-time adventure movie that has a crossdressing lesbian villain-protagonist who is a pirate who pilots an airship. IT RULES.

Hopefully you enjoy one of these on your next movie night.

Wow! I mean, wow! In case you didn’t see, there was a new trailer for the Dead Cells Return To Castlevania crossover and I’m so excited because we got a pretty big confirmation: SHANOA WILL BE IN IT. Maria, too, and certainly other characters are soon to follow. But I wasn’t expecting Shanoa at all, I’m so happy. I think of note are two things: Shanoa has access to Acerbatus and Torpor, which are two of Albus’s signature glyphs, and she also has a statue of Albus in the room she’s in. Which implies that she’s post-OOE, which will be super exciting to see. I hope they do some interesting things with her characterization since we haven’t really seen that before unless you count GOS, and I consider GOS Shanoa to be her own person separate from Original Flavor Shanoa, sort of. For lore reasons.

Another exciting thing is that I have finally realized a little dream of mine and started my own Castlevania forum, called Forgemasters. Hopefully this will be a welcoming place for all sorts of fans of the games ^_^ I’m a bit nervous because I’ve never run a forum before but it’s really exciting.

It’s my birthday! Or, it was, on the 19th. I waited until now to post anything about it since on the 20th I had plans to hang out with my girlfriend, thus extending the celebration a little bit :)

I had a delicious tres leche cake, and a lovely dinner at a local restaurant, and some of my cooler gifts include a large Breyer model of a Clydesdale horse that looks just like a horse I work with IRL; Tinderbox by Siouxsie and the Banshees on a vinyl record (so good!); a ticket to a Molchat Doma concert (technically unrelated to my birthday but just happened to be a gift I received near my birthday… lol), as well as a Revolutionary Girl Utena soundtrack CD and a fancy collar from my gf. SO! all in all I would call it a pretty good birthday. We went thrifting, too, even though we didn’t find much it was nice.

This past year has been a pretty good one all things considered, since I broke a lot of my worst depressive habits, started volunteering, cleaned my room in its entirety for the first time in years, got more into fashion, makeup and expressing myself, confronted some unresolved trauma, and dabbled in a lot of different creative hobbies (website design being my latest pet project…) Just a lot of little things that add up to a lot. I’m a happier person than I was last year.

So… Yeah. Here’s to another year!

Hmm. I think it’s only fair that the first post on my new website should be about the website itself, and the circumstances of its creation.

First things first, I’ve been a Tumblr user for nearly half my life. A lot of people hail Tumblr as one of the last bastions of a “bygone era” of the internet- no algorithms, no obnoxious monetization, no tracking, etc. However, Tumblr has gradually been introducing a lot of features that go against what the userbase values so much. Monetized post promotion, a “For-You Page”, and obnoxious “live” banner that you can’t permanently opt out of taking up the top of your screen, replacing the button to see your own blog with one for their merch store on the app, the “Tumblr TV” thing I’ve seen described as “TikTok but for images”, and more and more questionable decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever stop using Tumblr entirely, but the writing is on the wall- not even your “last bastion” is safe. I’m sure a lot of more knowledgeable people could write about the pitfalls of the “centralized internet”, but I am not those knowledgeable people, so I’ll leave it to the experts. The fact of the matter is that the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to rely on some company with their own interests for my place on the vastness of the internet.

I had seen a post circulated on Tumblr about Neocities, that had linked a bunch of tutorial pages for HTML and such, but every time I saw it I had kind of thought- “no, I wouldn’t be able to do that”. I had dabbled a bit in HTML during high school but it all was lost on me. It’s very easy for me to be easily intimidated by new things, even if when I eventually try them I end up enjoying them. And I did! When I finally signed up for Neocities just to poke around and try it out, I ended up loving it. Designing a website, it turns out, is a lot of fun! It’s like moving into a cute little apartment, or writing in a diary.

So, yeah, I think I’m here to stay. And I hope this makes anyone else reading it who’s thought about making a website gain the confidence to make the leap. I’d also like to thank the website sadgrl.online, where I found a lot of the tutorials that helped me design my website as it is now.

Thanks for reading!