Around the end of 2025 I had liminal spaces on my mind, and the potential horror media that uses it aesthetically. I’ve always found “liminal space” imagery very effective and particularly images of playplaces, children’s libraries, swimming pools, and other examples of “Child Architecture” and I wanted to ruminate on why exactly I find that kind of imagery compelling and how I’d like to see it used in art, since I think a lot of “liminal horror” is kind of missing the melancholia I associate with the imagery. This won’t be super structured, it’s just some thoughts I’m chewing on.

Like, there’s kind of an artifice to it, right? I’ve always loved “indoors-outdoors” architecture, ceilings painted like skies, fake trees, that kind of stuff. When I was a kid I asked my parents to paint the little entrance to my room to look like a cave (I even had a blue sheer curtain as a waterfall). I love that kind of stuff! Liminal spaces are often feel “fake” in their emptiness in the same way. It’s a kind of artificiality even knowing it was once inhabited by other people.

There’s also like, I think I said this before, a comfort-discomfort juxtaposition. My favorite liminal space imagery evokes childhood, a particular era of childhood, but childhood does not necessarily mean safety and simplicity. I find that analysis content on this kind of thing misses the mark- I’ve seen a lot of youtube videos where the narrator will posit that these spaces feel eerie because it makes us long for a simpler time, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. That’s surface level! I think it taps into the inherent contradictions one finds when contending with traumatic memory. The room where you played with all your toys, read books and had sleepovers is the same one where you might have been hurt or first contended with the pain of living. Where something bad happened. These images make you yearn in spite of the horror, the emptiness evoking how this has all been left to rot. Should you let it? Is it okay to want it all back? To want love from the hand that bruises?

...If you can remember that at all. An oft mentioned aspect of this imagery is how it feels familiar, like you might have been there. I think this is in part because these images and their curation generally appeals to the homogenized aesthetics of 90s/2000s American suburban life, a demographic that tends to be pretty online. But this also appeals to the "fallible memory” symptom of trauma, right? Looking at a room that could be anywhere but feeling this crushing sense that something bad happened there or maybe you went there and you have this profound discomfort about it. That’s a real and disquieting feeling to have. Many playplaces and other child-friendly spaces are being abandoned, demolished and more and arcades and playplaces are becoming outdated. This, too, can lead to this eerie feeling of memory in decay.

I have stated many times before that I reject idealized nostalgia, and I think many of these -core and aesthetic movements tend to lionize the past. Y2K and frutiger aero and the like. I think web revival works because it is constructive, it is a willing decision to take the elements from a past incarnation of the web and its ideals to create a better space for yourself. Liminal space imagery and artists who play with it have the potential to do the opposite- to make it destructive. A stripping away of all illusions of the past being simpler, better. An acknowledgement of how much it hurts to grow up. Of the “rot” of the past.

I think “traumacore” as an aesthetic/art movement is probably the closest to “getting it”. As a terribly online tumblr-using teen I used to vocally criticize the aesthetic for “glorifying trauma” but I think that was motivated by an unwillingness to be confronted by art. And like, I don’t know, I think collage-work and recontextualization and playing on these disorienting feelings are all things I love to see in art so I’ve come to respect it a bit. I like how it’s inherently kind of a bit internet-y. So, yeah, consider this my official apology for not being understanding when I was in my teens :P

So that’s that on that. I’ve updated the Wellspring of Memory in Clovenglade, recently, with the new card set! It looks amazing!!! I’ve also made a rather exciting change- a cool card flip animation! AND!!! You can now only pull a card once per tab session which I think is more immersive while also being somewhat of a soft limit. If you really need to pull a card again or want to look at all the new ones right away you can just exit your tab and open it again. It even saves which card you pulled during the browser session and will continue to display it even if you leave the page to explore other areas of Clovenglade. I’m planning to make the memory-match game next, unsure how long that will take but most of the graphics are already done. I also want to add some of the saddles and bridles from the card set to the Tack Your Horse minigame.

EDIT 1/18: HI HI the game is out now! I further edited the limit on the cards both in the wellspring and in the game (which lets you draw a bonus card!) so now it should be once a day. Having it only persist in one tab just wasn't ~immersive~ enough for me. It's still a "soft limit" since you can get around this by changing the date on your computer or using an incognito tab.

ALSO ALSO! I watched Mulholland Drive yesterday and it was AMAZING! It totally blew my mind! Easily in my top 10 movies now, I love toxic yuri. I know it’s a cliche to say Lynch movies are dream-like but I think there is something to be said about how the non-reality half of the film bombards you with imagery and plot threads that are then neatly woven together in the “reality”. It really does make you feel like you’re in Diane’s head as she dreams about this fantasy life, with all the subconscious acknowledgments of what really happened got broken up and mixed into the batter, so to speak. And then when the truth is revealed... God, when I finally got to the bit where we see the context for the recurring phrase “This is the girl.” I GASPED. What a great movie! I definitely need to get around to watching more of David Lynch’s filmography since I’ve been meaning to after I thoroughly enjoyed Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me.

I’ve been super busy with work but I am glad about it, I’ve been needing the money and it gives me a huge confidence boost to hear all my higher ups talk about how much they love having me around and how I’m their favorite every single day LOL. (Probably a shoe-in for a raise once evaluations come, right?) I got some Thai food for dinner last night with my Christmas money stash, we walked down to the restaurant because the weather is so nice right now... Life is good.

Today's song is: El Enano De La Catedral - Chirere

Today's tarot is: Six of Cups, Page of Swords, Two of Wands, The World, Two of Pentacles

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so glad to be done with 2025, yuck. Super turbulant, stressful year for me. But I did make a lot of cool additions to the website and I made some necessary life changes, so it’s not all bad. I’ve got a new job, and I’m happier with it. I’ve gotten some healthier habits, got some stuff off my chest, and we even grew a vegetable garden. It’s hard to call this a bad year at all, just a difficult one...

At the start of each year, I write up a post with goals for the coming year, and I like to see how many of the previous year’s goals I met. So, let’s do that now!

“I love hosting games on my website!!! To this end, I want to learn a good free engine for making simple web-games. I want to make memory match, breakout, etc. style minigames in particular, which shouldn't be too difficult. I’ve been sniffing at GDevelop. But we'll see.”

Done! I’ve started using Construct 2 and I’ve been really enjoying it so far. It’s perfect for making simple games to put on the site. You can see it in use in the new minigames on Clovenglade. This was my biggest goal since it’s always been a huge part of my “vision” for the site to have games and stuff like that. I am super pleased to have found a tool I like.

“I’d really love to redo the CSS on my OOE shrine so it doesn't use a clunky looking template. Nothing can replace just doing the CSS yourself, and I wish I had actually attempted to at the time! It's just hard to find motivation for this kind of thing.”

Done! It was a pretty simple fix and I’m happy with the result.

“I’ve got plans for a shrine that, if all goes well, should randomize some text on the page-load to give the illusion of the webpage being “alive” and “talking to you” (if you're at all familiar with my tastes in online horror webseries you can probably guess what this shrine will be for.) The concept is that it's an in-universe website for an in-universe media property. I dunno when I’ll get around to this but I think the concept is pretty solid!”

That would be my Angel Hare shrine from late January, which turned out great. If you don’t know what Angel Hare is, it’s an analogue horror/mystery animated cartoon series on Youtube where guardian angels speak to children through the television, so the goal of that shrine was to kind of simulate that, like the angels were speaking to you through the website as well. It was a lot of fun to make and there are a ton of text variations implemented. I’d call this one a success.

“I want to get back into writing music... I wrote a lot of shitty vocaloid music as a teenager but now I want to try actually cooking lol”

Working on it! Kind of. I’m learning bass guitar slowly but surely. I hope to have something out by the end of 2026 maybe but we’ll see.

“I believe I mentioned before my idea to make an interactive pet code snippet that accommodates for any image resolution and can be hosted 100% locally, called LocalPet and based on the code for the Clovenglade stable. That's still on the table as a future plan.”

The future is now- LocalPet can be found via the menagerie directory. It’s a little clunky to set it up but I am pleased with the results, as you can probably tell considering I used it on almost all my virtual pets.

I didn’t write a ton of goals last year. But I did accomplish a lot. I added a new expansion to Clovenglade and the next one is nearly finished. I made another shrine (my Undertale essay) and I made a new Adventure Game Studio game (Werewoods) with some new experiments in using items and boolean logic and having an effect on the game world, and fun stuff, like character customization and a following companion character. I plan to use this experience to its fullest when I do my expansion to Clovenglade’s Go Riding game. And I made the Picture Palace which is one of my favorite pages I’ve made, it’s a virtual movie theatre! I also wrote a novel-length fanfiction. That was fun.

As for my future goals...

-Finish Galloping Games. I only have the cards and one more minigame left to finish!

-More games. I really like having them on my site. In particular I want to put more on my arcade, little standalone projects. It is a road I wish to follow.

-”Cherished Celebration”, the largest Clovenglade update, which will expand the Go Riding game as well as some other features. I want to have it out by the end of 2026 in some capacity.

-Better blog posts. I feel like they’re getting back into “droll life update” territory which I’m kind of dissatisfied with. I want to make more analysis content like that post I did on werewolves. In particular I want to do a full retrospective on Stranger Things now that it’s Over since it was pretty special to me back when season 1 came out and it’s only gotten disappointing from there. I also want to make a post on Hypnospace Outlaw now that I’ve played through it for the first time, though I think I’ll eschew the review format and just write about my thoughts on it. That kinda stuff. I want to shift my focus here to something a little more interesting to read.

-I want to read more, and to write more. I particularly want to make more original works.

-More shrines! I was chewing on the idea of making a shrine for lesbian vampire movies and why I tend to gravitate towards “problematic representation”. Maybe you explore the essay by exploring a castle via point and click mechanics?

-I want to be on my phone less. I’ve been thinking a lot about the sentiment that “the internet used to be a place” (in that, you visit, and you leave, and your computer is the dedicated “space” to engage with it. Like, yeah, I am kind of sick of my attention span being totally shot and always having that constant tether. I want more intention to the way I use the internet and break that addictive loop. Like, the way the infinite slop-scroll of youtube shorts can hook you so quickly is frightening. I’ve tried many ways to wean myself but always “relapse”, so I’m going with the nuclear option- I can’t turn on my phone on my days off unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. I’ve already been spending more time outside, watching clouds, stuff like that. On the first day I enforced that for myself, I saw a woodpecker just in my backyard. I kind of hope that it sticks.

Here’s hoping for a calm and less crazy 2026.

Today's song is: Hypnospace Outlaw OST - Millennium Anthem (2000 New Year’s Eve)

Today's tarot is: Temperance (reversed), Ace of Cups, Seven of Cups (reversed), Three of Wands, The Star