Jon Ureña's Blog, page 36
November 15, 2022
November 13, 2022
Henry Darger (AI-generated images)
Don’t know about Mr. Darger? According to Wikipedia:
The guy was likely autistic, was neglected throughout his childhood, and lived the rest of his life in isolation. On and off, he believed that girls have penises.
As it pertains this entry, the serious neural networks that produce images were trained on Darger’s stuff as well. So let’s bring this motherfucker back from the dead, shall we?
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy novel manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor illustrations for the story.
The guy was likely autistic, was neglected throughout his childhood, and lived the rest of his life in isolation. On and off, he believed that girls have penises.
As it pertains this entry, the serious neural networks that produce images were trained on Darger’s stuff as well. So let’s bring this motherfucker back from the dead, shall we?
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
November 12, 2022
Random AI-generated images #20
Who’s up for some more AI-assisted depravity? Just me?
I’m phasing out the previous iterations of the serious neural network. The newest version is a beast that knows no competitors, except for anime AI’s niche of unrestrained sexuality. This entry features mature content, in case you work somewhere that sucks.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
I’m phasing out the previous iterations of the serious neural network. The newest version is a beast that knows no competitors, except for anime AI’s niche of unrestrained sexuality. This entry features mature content, in case you work somewhere that sucks.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
November 11, 2022
Random AI-generated images #19
Sometimes I rely on my pet neural networks to render some wild thought that crossed my mind, and other times the images are run-offs from the stuff I generate for whatever chapter I’m working on. In any case, three neural networks were involved in bringing to life the following images (plenty of them cursed).
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
November 8, 2022
Let’s remember each other on Tanabata (AI-generated images)
Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata. Let’s remember each other on Tanabata.
[Let's remember each other on Tanabata]
[Let's remember each other on Tanabata]
November 6, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 79: AI-generated images
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with a couple of neural networks, one of them a serious artist and the other a pervert trained exclusively on anime. I had already rendered about three-fifths of the images I would have included in this entry, when a beast of a new neural network rolled out, one that plays in a different ballpark. You will notice the difference in abilities, particularly because its products will come after the other AIs' attempts.
Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked .
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains so many images, dude. Like, a ton.]
Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked .
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains so many images, dude. Like, a ton.]
We're Fucked, Pt. 79 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
A child's vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations. A small head is resting on my arm, and I smell the shampoo and conditioner that cleaned that hair and scalp.
Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head? I blink away the fog of drowsiness. I must have fallen asleep like a slug in its tiny burrow.
Behold, the glowing flower of a child's face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf. Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows. In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles. Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.
She sniffles, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of her wool sweater. A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes; Nairu arches her eyebrows and repeats the utterances of confusion while pointing at the sky. She seeks my input, although I'm the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.
I gasp, breathing in cold air. Don't tell me she has spotted a UFO! About time I witnessed one of them. I picture a spacecraft shaped like a watch battery, hovering higher than the tallest mountain around. The stars are reflected in its silvery, mirror-like top half. In the underside, the gravity-bending propulsion engines, likely powered by a black hole, phosphoresce in shades of green, red and yellow as they interact with the atmosphere. Are there lifeforms riding the craft? They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system. Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they'll waste their wages at some alien brothel.
The sky is painted onyx black. From the left, the canopy of an evergreen tree has sneaked into the frame. The coalesced silhouette of its leaves and branches resembles a hoarfrost-covered lung.
Nairu jabs her finger at the sky while she babbles in her long-extinct language.
"A-am I this drowsy," I ask, "or is Nairu pointing at nothing?"
"I think that's the point, darling," Jacqueline says in a low voice from my left.
I gasp.
"I-is she trying to warn us that it's over, that the end has come?"
"Baby, she's telling us this isn't the sky she grew up with."
"Ah, of course. This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse."
Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age? The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet. Among the glittering embers of the stars, among the amoeba-shaped nebulas, I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones. Every night our gaze would have drifted towards the stars. Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.
Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever. But the celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors. Now, when humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness, and during the day, the dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.
Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities. Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.
I blow a billowing white puff towards the sky, then I knead Nairu's warm hand with my icy fingers.
"Yes, all that bright light is gone," I say in a quavering voice while the chill pierces my bones. "You have noticed because you aren't blind yet. Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering? I know the truth, even though I don't understand it."
The darkness has blotted out the moon, or else that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts. I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats. Instead, I peer into the the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater. As I slide my gaze around, I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle's flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight. If I blink or distract myself, those twinkling dots will be snuffed out. Maybe I'm only imagining them, maybe I'm losing my mind, but what difference does it make to me? And if I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils, I may get a glimpse of Her: Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.
I'm hearing a low rumble in the distance, like the noise of an electric guitar being played with a grunge distortion pedal. The wind slaps its frozen fingers against my face. Although my brain is burning up, the cold is numbing my skin and creeping into my body, where it turns the blood into slush. Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown. I will hallucinate that I'm a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.
What's that over the black hills? Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons? Do you grow stronger as you pluck the meat from its sockets? The air tastes of fresh blood, which trickles down the gullets of your dying sisters. Suck the warm lifeblood flowing like sap from the wounds of your enemies. You can't hold onto the lives of others, or even your own.
A sudden sensation jolts through my body: I'm falling and spinning. The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I'm hurtling towards the black ocean above, in which the worlds are sinking like stones in water.
The hollow noises of footsteps and doors closing echoed in the velvety darkness as I sat on cold, anonymous stairs to escape from a prison of screams and insults. The blood of my ancestors coated my hands, dripped down my elbows and onto the step under my feet, where the blood puddled around my shoes. Its stifling odor, mingled with the sweat pouring out of me, turned into a nauseating wave of bitterness. My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut. I closed my eyes and built shelters in islands and in the canopies of sequoias, I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons; anywhere I could rest as a hermit in sealed silence. I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts. In the end, the parting clouds would reveal the stars as they were before the sky cracked and bled.
"How long?" I whispered while tears formed in the corners of my eyes. "How long until She arrives?"
My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor. Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond. This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out. Our cells will be devoured by rust. Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we're safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode. Yet, in this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive: one to my left and the other to my right. In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.
"How long?" I whisper again.
I've faced the barbaric, senseless absurdity step by step. The lights will shut off soon enough, so let's bathe in the cosmic ocean, let's float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe. I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.
---
Author's note: the three songs for today are "機械仕掛乃宇宙" (Kikaijikake no Uchuu) by Ichiko Aoba, "Emily" by Joanna Newsom, and "Young Lion" by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-four songs so far. Check it out.
Thus concludes the sequence titled "Who Stole the Stars?" as well as the saga of Nairu the Paleolithic, that started with the sequence "A Gift From the Ice Age" back in chapter 62 (which I posted in the 13th of July). More or less, this chapter also concludes the traditional second act of the story.
It took me about forty-one thousand words to render the setup and ramifications of a single sentence in my original treatment for this novel (long gone; back then I believed it would be a novella), that said, more or less: "Leire travels to the Ice Age and returns with a child."
The next chapter will kick off a whole new sequence, titled "Cumlord of the Abyss." I've accumulated 4,563 words of notes for it, but the sum of rendered scenes will end up at least twice and a half that length.
---
A child's vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations. A small head is resting on my arm, and I smell the shampoo and conditioner that cleaned that hair and scalp.
Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head? I blink away the fog of drowsiness. I must have fallen asleep like a slug in its tiny burrow.
Behold, the glowing flower of a child's face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf. Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows. In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles. Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.
She sniffles, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of her wool sweater. A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes; Nairu arches her eyebrows and repeats the utterances of confusion while pointing at the sky. She seeks my input, although I'm the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.
I gasp, breathing in cold air. Don't tell me she has spotted a UFO! About time I witnessed one of them. I picture a spacecraft shaped like a watch battery, hovering higher than the tallest mountain around. The stars are reflected in its silvery, mirror-like top half. In the underside, the gravity-bending propulsion engines, likely powered by a black hole, phosphoresce in shades of green, red and yellow as they interact with the atmosphere. Are there lifeforms riding the craft? They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system. Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they'll waste their wages at some alien brothel.
The sky is painted onyx black. From the left, the canopy of an evergreen tree has sneaked into the frame. The coalesced silhouette of its leaves and branches resembles a hoarfrost-covered lung.
Nairu jabs her finger at the sky while she babbles in her long-extinct language.
"A-am I this drowsy," I ask, "or is Nairu pointing at nothing?"
"I think that's the point, darling," Jacqueline says in a low voice from my left.
I gasp.
"I-is she trying to warn us that it's over, that the end has come?"
"Baby, she's telling us this isn't the sky she grew up with."
"Ah, of course. This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse."
Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age? The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet. Among the glittering embers of the stars, among the amoeba-shaped nebulas, I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones. Every night our gaze would have drifted towards the stars. Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.
Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever. But the celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors. Now, when humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness, and during the day, the dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.
Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities. Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.
I blow a billowing white puff towards the sky, then I knead Nairu's warm hand with my icy fingers.
"Yes, all that bright light is gone," I say in a quavering voice while the chill pierces my bones. "You have noticed because you aren't blind yet. Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering? I know the truth, even though I don't understand it."
The darkness has blotted out the moon, or else that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts. I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats. Instead, I peer into the the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater. As I slide my gaze around, I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle's flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight. If I blink or distract myself, those twinkling dots will be snuffed out. Maybe I'm only imagining them, maybe I'm losing my mind, but what difference does it make to me? And if I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils, I may get a glimpse of Her: Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.
I'm hearing a low rumble in the distance, like the noise of an electric guitar being played with a grunge distortion pedal. The wind slaps its frozen fingers against my face. Although my brain is burning up, the cold is numbing my skin and creeping into my body, where it turns the blood into slush. Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown. I will hallucinate that I'm a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.
What's that over the black hills? Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons? Do you grow stronger as you pluck the meat from its sockets? The air tastes of fresh blood, which trickles down the gullets of your dying sisters. Suck the warm lifeblood flowing like sap from the wounds of your enemies. You can't hold onto the lives of others, or even your own.
A sudden sensation jolts through my body: I'm falling and spinning. The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I'm hurtling towards the black ocean above, in which the worlds are sinking like stones in water.
The hollow noises of footsteps and doors closing echoed in the velvety darkness as I sat on cold, anonymous stairs to escape from a prison of screams and insults. The blood of my ancestors coated my hands, dripped down my elbows and onto the step under my feet, where the blood puddled around my shoes. Its stifling odor, mingled with the sweat pouring out of me, turned into a nauseating wave of bitterness. My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut. I closed my eyes and built shelters in islands and in the canopies of sequoias, I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons; anywhere I could rest as a hermit in sealed silence. I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts. In the end, the parting clouds would reveal the stars as they were before the sky cracked and bled.
"How long?" I whispered while tears formed in the corners of my eyes. "How long until She arrives?"
My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor. Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond. This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out. Our cells will be devoured by rust. Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we're safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode. Yet, in this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive: one to my left and the other to my right. In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.
"How long?" I whisper again.
I've faced the barbaric, senseless absurdity step by step. The lights will shut off soon enough, so let's bathe in the cosmic ocean, let's float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe. I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.
---
Author's note: the three songs for today are "機械仕掛乃宇宙" (Kikaijikake no Uchuu) by Ichiko Aoba, "Emily" by Joanna Newsom, and "Young Lion" by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-four songs so far. Check it out.
Thus concludes the sequence titled "Who Stole the Stars?" as well as the saga of Nairu the Paleolithic, that started with the sequence "A Gift From the Ice Age" back in chapter 62 (which I posted in the 13th of July). More or less, this chapter also concludes the traditional second act of the story.
It took me about forty-one thousand words to render the setup and ramifications of a single sentence in my original treatment for this novel (long gone; back then I believed it would be a novella), that said, more or less: "Leire travels to the Ice Age and returns with a child."
The next chapter will kick off a whole new sequence, titled "Cumlord of the Abyss." I've accumulated 4,563 words of notes for it, but the sum of rendered scenes will end up at least twice and a half that length.
November 5, 2022
Better AI-generated images with upgraded service
Determined to ruin the lives of visual artists everywhere, the service that I exploit to generate images has rolled out a new and beastly neural network that has been in the works for a long time. The results, inspired by characters from my ongoing novel
We’re Fucked
, are good.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of cool images]
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains plenty of cool images]
November 4, 2022
Random AI-generated images #18
Wasn’t Halloween like a week ago? I’ve accumulated some eerie and/or spooky AI-generated pictures by coincidence, so I may as well dedicate an entry to them.
I’ve posted thirty-one other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out through this link.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
I’ve posted thirty-one other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out through this link.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
November 2, 2022
Life update (11/02/2022)
Check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I usually write these entries to vent my frustrations, which serves a self-regulatory psychological function. However, I'm currently fine. Although the next cycle of depression will hit any day now (a process that will continue for the rest of my life), these days I can say that I'm perfectly content. In my free time I'm able to do exactly what makes me feel fulfilled; if I didn't have to keep a full-time job, I'd feel like I've won the lottery.
Some years ago I gave up on writing because I've never felt comfortable enough working in my native language. As a child, I needed to put my thoughts down on paper for the same self-regulatory reasons as these days, but my mother didn't believe in privacy nor in boundaries, so the moment I left the house, sometimes even while I was taking a shower, she went through my notebooks. When I complained about it, she told me that she had the right to do so.
I ended up teaching myself English. It became my personal language that gave me the space I needed to grow on my own, space I lacked even physically: I had been forcefully moved into someone else's bedroom, where I was treated like an unwanted guest. As I aged, most of the stuff I read or watched was in English, most of the authors I admired were either native English speakers or Japanese (I'd gladly learn Japanese if I thought I was capable of becoming fluent at it), and over the years I gave up entirely on reading in my own language. However, I didn't believe I could become proficient enough in English to write at a professional level. I wrote plenty of stuff in Spanish, but it never felt comfortable, and I found myself having to translate many thoughts into words that wouldn't have crossed my mind.
A now defunct English writer who moved to Spain in his thirties, after I told him about these issues, shared that he had stopped reading and writing in his own language to adapt. I didn't want to do that; I don't feel like I have much in common with the Spanish people (or even the Basque) although I was born here, nor see much merit in most of their cultural productions. After the couple of books I tried to publish in Spanish failed catastrophically, I gave up on writing.
Long story short, I ended up writing my own stuff in English anyway. You can check out all the texts I've written in the last few years through my personal page. My English will never stop sounding "odd" to native English speakers, but maybe that gives my texts some freshness. Besides, Nabokov pulled it off, so why can't I? Some people have told me that they enjoy the stuff I'm writing these days, and that's as much success as I was ever likely to get.
Anyway, I wanted to mention three things I've been interested in lately. Randall Carlson posted through the After Skool channel an interesting talk about the origins of Halloween. He relies on the works of researchers from previous centuries, who had been bothered by the uncanny fact that the Day of the Dead and similarly themed festivities were celebrated pretty much in the same dates in extremely distant locations and by cultures that weren't in contact with each other. For example, when the ancient Spanish first met the Peruvians, they realized to their astonishment that both shared the 2nd of November as the Day of the Dead. Long-dead researchers, now mostly "cancelled" due to wrongthink but whose research can be accessed at least physically, studied cultures around the world and came to the conclusion that these festivities were based on some unknown event that happened in the distant past. Randall Carlson suggests that the event is the Younger Dryas cataclysm, for which we now have lots of evidence, and the details he brings up about these cultures' practices and beliefs suggest so. I wasn't on board with some of his speculation, but you don't have to agree with everything.
This is the aforementioned video: link.
Leire, the deranged protagonist of my ongoing novel We're Fucked, mentioned ages ago that if she found the drive to do so, she'd love to make a video game that was more or less a modern version of Tarn Adams' Dwarf Fortress, but likely without all the Tolkienesque fantasy stuff. For those who don't know, Dwarf Fortress was an artisan project that started back in 2006 by a likely autistic man, and that consisted on an extremely detailed simulation of a fantasy world. The result is hard to explain, but it became the grandfather of a whole genre of games, of which Rimworld may be the most successful modern version. However, I was never entirely on board with Rimworld, because it doesn't feature height layers; height-based structures, mining, etc. have been so vital to human development that colony builders that don't feature it don't feel right to me. The creator of Rimworld argued that it would have been too computationally expensive to implement it in his game, and that whole thing bothered me so much that 3-4 years ago I went through the trouble of programming a 3D-based pathfinding algorithm myself: here's the link. However, it was written in Python; through the process of developing that I realized how flawed the programming language is, which ended up becoming a rant in my current novel.
Unfortunately, Dwarf Fortress was so graphically unpleasant (based on ASCII characters) and with such an abysmal interface that despite its gloriousness, I hadn't been able to get back to it in years. However, the Adams brothers have been working to modernize it and release it on Steam, and it's coming out on the sixth of December.
Link to the short teaser trailer: Dwarf Fortress teaser trailer.
The last thing I wanted to mention was Chainsaw Man. Its protagonist, Denji, is wild and deranged, and plenty of the visuals and interactions between the characters are strange and absurd. I couldn't imagine any production company adaptating this story successfully. However, Mappa has been knocking it out of the park.
The latest episode, number four, features the fight between Denji and the Leech Devil, the first one in which we get a real sense of how unhinged and feral our boob-obsessed protagonist is. The cinematography and animation have been consistently incredible. The voice actors are giving their all as well, but that's to be expected: the Japanese seem to have the most passionate VAs in the world. 10/10, would smell Power's shit.
Link below to the fight between Denji and the devil:
Denji versus the Leech Devil
---
I usually write these entries to vent my frustrations, which serves a self-regulatory psychological function. However, I'm currently fine. Although the next cycle of depression will hit any day now (a process that will continue for the rest of my life), these days I can say that I'm perfectly content. In my free time I'm able to do exactly what makes me feel fulfilled; if I didn't have to keep a full-time job, I'd feel like I've won the lottery.
Some years ago I gave up on writing because I've never felt comfortable enough working in my native language. As a child, I needed to put my thoughts down on paper for the same self-regulatory reasons as these days, but my mother didn't believe in privacy nor in boundaries, so the moment I left the house, sometimes even while I was taking a shower, she went through my notebooks. When I complained about it, she told me that she had the right to do so.
I ended up teaching myself English. It became my personal language that gave me the space I needed to grow on my own, space I lacked even physically: I had been forcefully moved into someone else's bedroom, where I was treated like an unwanted guest. As I aged, most of the stuff I read or watched was in English, most of the authors I admired were either native English speakers or Japanese (I'd gladly learn Japanese if I thought I was capable of becoming fluent at it), and over the years I gave up entirely on reading in my own language. However, I didn't believe I could become proficient enough in English to write at a professional level. I wrote plenty of stuff in Spanish, but it never felt comfortable, and I found myself having to translate many thoughts into words that wouldn't have crossed my mind.
A now defunct English writer who moved to Spain in his thirties, after I told him about these issues, shared that he had stopped reading and writing in his own language to adapt. I didn't want to do that; I don't feel like I have much in common with the Spanish people (or even the Basque) although I was born here, nor see much merit in most of their cultural productions. After the couple of books I tried to publish in Spanish failed catastrophically, I gave up on writing.
Long story short, I ended up writing my own stuff in English anyway. You can check out all the texts I've written in the last few years through my personal page. My English will never stop sounding "odd" to native English speakers, but maybe that gives my texts some freshness. Besides, Nabokov pulled it off, so why can't I? Some people have told me that they enjoy the stuff I'm writing these days, and that's as much success as I was ever likely to get.
Anyway, I wanted to mention three things I've been interested in lately. Randall Carlson posted through the After Skool channel an interesting talk about the origins of Halloween. He relies on the works of researchers from previous centuries, who had been bothered by the uncanny fact that the Day of the Dead and similarly themed festivities were celebrated pretty much in the same dates in extremely distant locations and by cultures that weren't in contact with each other. For example, when the ancient Spanish first met the Peruvians, they realized to their astonishment that both shared the 2nd of November as the Day of the Dead. Long-dead researchers, now mostly "cancelled" due to wrongthink but whose research can be accessed at least physically, studied cultures around the world and came to the conclusion that these festivities were based on some unknown event that happened in the distant past. Randall Carlson suggests that the event is the Younger Dryas cataclysm, for which we now have lots of evidence, and the details he brings up about these cultures' practices and beliefs suggest so. I wasn't on board with some of his speculation, but you don't have to agree with everything.
This is the aforementioned video: link.
Leire, the deranged protagonist of my ongoing novel We're Fucked, mentioned ages ago that if she found the drive to do so, she'd love to make a video game that was more or less a modern version of Tarn Adams' Dwarf Fortress, but likely without all the Tolkienesque fantasy stuff. For those who don't know, Dwarf Fortress was an artisan project that started back in 2006 by a likely autistic man, and that consisted on an extremely detailed simulation of a fantasy world. The result is hard to explain, but it became the grandfather of a whole genre of games, of which Rimworld may be the most successful modern version. However, I was never entirely on board with Rimworld, because it doesn't feature height layers; height-based structures, mining, etc. have been so vital to human development that colony builders that don't feature it don't feel right to me. The creator of Rimworld argued that it would have been too computationally expensive to implement it in his game, and that whole thing bothered me so much that 3-4 years ago I went through the trouble of programming a 3D-based pathfinding algorithm myself: here's the link. However, it was written in Python; through the process of developing that I realized how flawed the programming language is, which ended up becoming a rant in my current novel.
Unfortunately, Dwarf Fortress was so graphically unpleasant (based on ASCII characters) and with such an abysmal interface that despite its gloriousness, I hadn't been able to get back to it in years. However, the Adams brothers have been working to modernize it and release it on Steam, and it's coming out on the sixth of December.
Link to the short teaser trailer: Dwarf Fortress teaser trailer.
The last thing I wanted to mention was Chainsaw Man. Its protagonist, Denji, is wild and deranged, and plenty of the visuals and interactions between the characters are strange and absurd. I couldn't imagine any production company adaptating this story successfully. However, Mappa has been knocking it out of the park.
The latest episode, number four, features the fight between Denji and the Leech Devil, the first one in which we get a real sense of how unhinged and feral our boob-obsessed protagonist is. The cinematography and animation have been consistently incredible. The voice actors are giving their all as well, but that's to be expected: the Japanese seem to have the most passionate VAs in the world. 10/10, would smell Power's shit.
Link below to the fight between Denji and the devil:
Denji versus the Leech Devil
