#like its hard to convey my feelings

[hope-ur-ok]

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[unexpectedbrickattack]

experimentin w shit heehee

[icewindandboringhorror]

I can't do much productively during the heat wave/health issue flare up/etc. like work on my games or anything where I have to sit at the computer/type for long periods of time, BUT.. I did passively sculpt a few tiny foods lol. I wanted to do one of my bigger usual sculptures, but those take so much more time and concentration, I thought something small just to keep my hands busy would be better.. close up photos look kind of weird and blurry from my camera settings or something, but overall they came out okay, especially in person.. Nearly the only reason I ever wanted to buy dolls as a kid was to get my hands on the miniature foods and plates and stuff that came with them, I've always just been obsessed with small versions of things like that, so.. why not make some! lol

[puppyeared]

for like 3 weeks i was wondering why i was sleeping so much and felt listless. and just now I managed to email 3 people and responded to a month old message in the span of an hour because I got back to TAKING MY FUCKIN MEDS..........

[dreamsy990]

my laptops like super fucking dead and its gonna be a couple days before i can get a new one so uh. have a ghost roxas au doodle from procreate instead. returning to my roots i suppose. do not ask me to explain the story context for this or whats going on because i will not explain ok. you can figure it out yourself <-( theres absolutely not enough information for you to figure it out for yourself )

[dapperrokyuu]

On the topic of Mochijun, Im sorry to say, but the pace of Vanitas no Carte is just so killed for me right now, I cant really feel anything about it for more than a moment, catch me when chapters are normal length or something spectacular happens and its impact can be properly conveyed through 16 pages- 😔✌️

[yellowocaballero]

I just finished your New Wave fic. I’m convinced everything your write is gold. I loved your TMA fics, with the most heartbreaking demon AU imaginable and the hilarity of Fahrenheit 101. I loved your moon knight fics, starting with Steven talking to animals on the reg at work to the system growing closer with a focus on Jake, i- there’s- it’s sooo much packed into it. When I’m on burnout, of art or writing (maybe life in general at times) I revisit your work and am thrown back into a creative headspace.

You are my favorite writer, you cram so much meaning and thought into your work and it shows. The characters are dumbasses and say the most ridiculous shit and turn around the next chapter and say the most thought provoking thing, and I don’t get whiplash from it because these characters just work! They just do, and I… am very much off track!

Anyways I just got into Batman and reading your fic is fueling that flame! I can’t wait to see what you have in store next, and I shall now stalk your blog for writing tips! I hope you have a nice day broski 💙

Thank you!! This is so sweet thank you so much! This ask is so nice!

Trust me, if there's meaning then it's because I get obsessive over these fics and I massively overthink them. I honestly wish I was better at making simpler, more elegant stories. I feel like nothing I do is truly going to be good until I can find that simplicity.

"Dipshit who says stupid stuff and then turns around and spouts ridiculous philosophy" is just how I talk. But I habitually approach my life from a standpoint of finding humor in everything, if only to soften the blow. I was once told that it's really hard to tell when I'm joking, because everything I say is always half-joking and always half-serious. I feel like that's pretty evident from my narration too...

As for writing advice...um, I was just speaking about this with somebody. When you're plotting a story, the first thing I like to figure out is what I'm trying to say. Everything else should be built around that. The joy of writing is that I think we all have something we want to say, or something we want people to know, or that we have an aspect of ourselves and our lives that we want to express. Most of the time, trying to convey those things verbally just results in a frustrating approximation of your true feelings. I find that when I manage a successful story, the depth and scale of what I'm trying to impart is fully understood and felt. It's rewarding. I think if people aren't understood on some level, by somebody, they kind of die.

Thanks for the sweet ask!!

[stephaniedola]

what i should be focused on: school

what i want to be focused on: working out, art, gay sex

[fair-lead]

textbook mentioned gravitational waves/radiation and i almost imploded in my seat

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[nebulaleaf]

woe... my peak of thinking my writing is at least tolerable is over... the feelings of inadequacy shall seep in...

[heartbeatbookclub]

It's 2 am as I start this, and I feel the need to put pen to paper on this thought, so to speak, because it's something I think about with relative frequency.

This is going to be more of a personal musing on my experience with Doki Doki Literature Club, and why it had such an impact on me when I first played it, as opposed to any more concrete analysis, so I guess you can keep reading if you want to know more about me as a person and my overall personal relationship to it.

Something I think about often in reference to DDLC is its status simultaneously as a satire on visual novels and all of the tropes therein, as well as a love letter to that genre, explicitly. It's very readily apparent if you've played a good few "weeb" visual novels that it very much fits that bill. I think my first experience with it makes it especially funny in that respect.

To give context, I first experienced Doki Doki Literature Club like a month or two after it came out, in a Skype call (shows how old I am) with 2 or 3 of my friends. During this period of my life, me and this small group of friends spent lots and lots of time just hanging out in Skype calls like this, doing whatever we pleased, spending time well into the next morning just enjoying each other's presence and seeing what fun shenanigans we could get into on the internet.

One frequent passtime of ours was playing visual novels. Not just any visual novels, no; we went looking for the most low effort, mediocre, low hanging fruit of visual novels we could download for free. The goal wasn't to enjoy a good story, the goal was to find something amusingly bad, whether in cliched, awkward, lazy writing, or in sheer absurdity. I still do this sometimes, though it's admittedly with a different thought in mind now.

I don't think this perception we had of visual novels, being that they're typically sloppy, cringe-inducing messes is necessarily uncommon even now, but it was especially common back then. It was "weeb shit", simple as, but even deeper than your typical weeb shit. The perception was something like watching High School DxD unironically; it's just weird.

And I don't really think the perception of visual novels being that way is necessarily inaccurate; there is a very low bar to entry to actually creating a visual novel just by the nature of the medium, so really, anyone with enough passion for a project and time on their hands can make one. As a consequence, there are a few egregiously bad visual novels, there are a few really excellent visual novels, but there are a great many just sort of okay, somewhat mediocre visual novels, and lots of visual novels created with not so honorable goals in mind.

And one thing we really enjoyed was just exploring what existed in the depths of unpopular visual novels slipping through the cracks of what people saw. For most of it, we were making fun of it, but there were a lot of points where we found stories which were mediocre, but ended up really enjoying our experience with it. I think an important thing to understand with that lower barrier to entry is that it enables people who really are passionate about telling a story to tell a story that has a lot of heart, and you can see all of that heart as a diamond within the rough of the actual construction. Even in VNs with more polish, typically there are still cracks right around the edges, where you can see just a little bit of the humanity that goes into it. It's sort of magical.

And Doki Doki Literature Club was an odd edge case, which successfully played with all of my perceptions of it. DDLC is probably the only game whose story is reliant on a plot twist where I actually went in completely blind. By all appearances, it was a silly little visual novel made with no sense of irony, and I spent a great deal of time laughing at its contents, completely unaware that they were in on the joke.

And my perception of it being this way I feel like colored a lot of what happened next when I looked into it. I forget exactly when our playthrough ended--we didn't make it to any of the deeper stuff, I watched a Let's Play for that--and I forget how the whole series of events following that went, but somehow or another, I learned of some of the true nature. Namely I saw what happened to Sayori.

It reminded me of Corpse Party, when I actually thought about it.

I'm not going to go deep in depth on all of my thoughts about Corpse Party nor any of its history, but to be frank, Corpse Party reeeally sits in that realm of "mediocre, but lots of heart" to me. I don't really think Corpse Party is very good, particularly elaborating on a lot of the lore, but I really enjoyed it when I first experienced it, and it's still something I occasionally like looking back over. It's deliciously dark, and is extremely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere out of what's ostensibly a collection of happy warm anime character tropes with little serious personality outside them.

So when I say that Sayori's death reminded me of Corpse Party, I mean that the way it paired playing the happy warm visual novel setting straight with extremely grim subject matter was done well.

Really, there were only a few other examples of this kind of media I could think of that really effectively utilized the exact kind of gut punch that DDLC did. Everything about the way the game framed itself around it, up until the final plot twist, really did feel like they were just elements of a visual novel playing themselves out. Sayo-nara really sets that tone for me--it still gives me chills sometimes when I hear it, because it sounds perfectly like what a "Bad Ending" theme for that kind of ending would likely sound like. It plays itself remarkably well into creating the setting, it really effectively feels like it is a normal visual novel falling apart at the seams.

I think that, more than anything, is why DDLC made such an impact on me when I first experienced it (which is remarkably different than the kind of mark it leaves on me now), it played so effectively with a genre I was so familiar with, and simultaneously played "mediocre visual novel with lots of heart" straight while also completely knocking "deep and terrifying existential horror" out of the park.

It's hard to truly describe, but there's just so much that feels so right about DDLC just being as it is. There's such a unique quality to the way it's written, to the way it's constructed, that goes down to its bones. It feels like that exact brand of junk food media you go to visual novels for. You don't necessarily want to think too deeply about the characters, or the setting of the story, or any of the deeper themes surrounding it; you just want to experience a nice story with some anime girls.

And then it yanks the rug out from under you, and makes you think it's junk food media with a side of deep and disturbing horror.

And then it yanks the second rug out from under that one, making you realize it's something much, much deeper.

I think something else it really appealed to, to me, was just that sense of being on the edge of the world which most indie games of that sort always give me. There are a shitload of examples I could give for this, but this sense I'm describing is the opposite of the sense which games like Undertale give me. Undertale's world feels lived in, it feels like it exists in a much, much wider concept of a great, sprawling world where billions of people live.

DDLC feels like you and the 4 girls in it are the only people in the universe. There are all of these environments you inhabit which ostensibly have other people who pass through them, live in them, there are implications of people, but inside this world, there's only you.

I think it just appeals to my desire to be transported to a complete other world for a little while. A limited space, where only things important to this experience exist, for this pure feeling of emotional catharsis. And that's something a lot of these sorts of simple visual novels appeal to; the goal isn't necessarily to tell some deeper story, it's just to present beats as they happen. DDLC takes that, and plays with it, both in a textual sense, as though these fictional characters exist and are somehow aware they're fictional, and in a meta sense, by directly playing around with your expectations and the way the entire thing is framed.

Or something like that.

Fun fact 1: Doki Doki Literature Club (specifically Sayo-Nara, still one of the few songs I can play entirely by memory) is what got me to start learning piano. I taught myself to play, and started mostly with the DDLC soundtrack (Which is very simple to play by ear, by the way, it's pretty much entirely C major.)

Fun fact 2: What initially inspired this thought was this video, which really reminded me of other visual novels we/I played that would utilize this particular style of music.

[tillman]

gahh . im still thinking about stuff.

[hazeism]

hi!! wanted to ask if you have any favorite books, either that you've read recently or of all time. Your prose is insane and I need to broaden my own vocabulary so if you have any book recs, fiction or nonfiction, I'd love to know :')

Hii :D ! ahaha, what a well-timed question; lately I've become the kind of guy who just really wants to talk about what people are reading, or are planning to read, and responding in kind, so thanks for giving me an opportunity to indulge that, haha. What a wicked invention the printing press was!!! (Also--thank you!! I'm glad my prose is to your taste. I'm happy !💕)

If you don't mind, I'll put a cut on this right away, because I know I'm very talkative, but let me put a TLDR above for all the novels/authors I mention here. Disclaimer also that I am kind of a dunce (I think you know this) so I like silly shit a lot of times . please be nice to me adfhbjkdg. :D

(No nonfiction also because I'm a frivolous and unworldly little sprite or something but if you want straight philosophy [which counts] come back and I'll do my Top Ten Epic Platonic Dialogues Compilation for you .)

TLDR: Read any UKLG you get your hands on, Cain by Jose Saramago, or any Saramago (though maybe not Skylight, which is not a good introduction to Saramago), very much enjoyed Sartre's The Age of Reason recently, Shadow & Claw or The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. If you feel like it, come off anon and tell me what you like, so I can give more tailored recommendations!!

Now if you're asking for favorites, like just the particular and arbitrary objects of my partiality, that stir my stupid little heart, the true answer is probably UKLG's The Farthest Shore, just because it is very special to me. I can't, of course, in good conscience, recommend the third novel of a six-novel fantasy series to someone (but of course read Le Guin, everyone should be reading Le Guin, it's dire for universal soteriology that we all read Le Guin; You'll probably get told to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and that's pretty solid. I liked The Lathe of Heaven as well. And if you read any Le Guin it doesn't hurt to pick up a copy of the Tao. I love the Tao man.)

Some friendlier recommendations, though:

José Saramago is someone I really consider peerless; There's no way to pick up a Saramago and not know who's written it. Cain is a bit drier, a bit more abrasive (almost accusatory, in that particular way you'll find in a Buddhist parable) and bleak than some other Saramagos, but it's one I like (perhaps for the trite reason that I like bucolic atmospheres and Classical antiquity as a setting) so it's the one I'll put forward.

Uhh, I've also been enjoying Sartre's Roads to Freedom lately, starting with The Age Of Reason. I'm partway through the second novel and umm... despite all the other things you could say about Sartre, lmfao, let it not be said that he is not a serious literary force. Serious is maybe the only word for it. Dire, too. I keep a commonplace book, so usually I take excerpts, but this was the first time in memory that I felt compelled to commit entire pages, ahah (I just took pictures though, fuck copying all that).

If you're itching for esoteric language, Shadow of the Torturer (as usually collected with Claw of the Conciliator in a single omnibus edition titled Shadow & Claw; the first of the give-or-take five volume Urth series) by Gene Wolfe will scratch you BLOODY. If you're particularly fussy, you might be irritated by your compulsion to Google, but I find it really makes the experience when you type in a word and the only results are "what the fuck did Gene Wolfe mean by this?" hahaha; Honestly, though, those kinds of complaints are borne from a lack of immersion, but you'll notice pretty quickly that the verbiage is a pretty crucial vehicle OF the immersion.

It may or may not become a commitment, though, if you like Urth enough to want to read through, so if you want Wolfe without the strings--though less of the exciting vocabulary, which is pretty necessarily constrained to Urth--I'd really highly recommend The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the novella OR the novel, I mean the former is volumized in the latter so just start it and if you feel like stopping then stop, haha). Mr. Terminal E is incredible but I scrape enough time out of my daily life to gush about his crazy literary density so I won't do it again here (you should ask my coworker, lmfao, who one time went "stop, hold on, hold on." because my face started getting really red while I was explaining to him some Wolfean gesture). If you read any Wolfe, and I mean ANY Wolfe, because his permatypes and his manipulations of them are endlessly interesting, feel free to come back and chat with me over it!!!

I guess I have to disclaim that my habit is mostly to pick through an author's corpus over a course of, usually, a couple years, and then sometimes I'll read things that will inform my understanding of the genre conventions or currents that the author is writing in (been enjoying Golden Age sci-fi recently)--it's not really as deliberate of a process as it sounds, but I think if you were to map my habits, that's the landscape of it. This means, though, that my reading is actually pretty narrow in scope, and I am not very well read or very knowledgeable in general (who is, in this economy) but it does mean that of the authors I do like, I can probably find the novel that'll work best for your taste.

If you want to come off anon, or I guess just leave another message, haha, (or if someone else wants to, idgaf, we're all friends here at tumblr user hazeism) describing the things you like or look for in a novel I can probably give you a more relevant recommendation. I've been dosing people up a lot lately tbh, it's like a parlor trick I've been doing; I have a conversation with someone and afterwards they'll have a PDF with a relevant Asimov story in their messages, hahaha. I can't help myself sometimes.

Come back anyway, though, if you read anything I talked about, okay? I want to hear about it 🥺

And alsooo (turning to face the audience) if anyone ever wants to put recs in my inbox (or my dms : ) slow replies though sorry I'm a hermit) I'd be happy to take 'em down. Can't guarantee I'll read them in a timely manner, or that you'll ever find out if/when I do, but it's good for me to leave my comfort zone.

[lunarsapphism]

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[readymades2002]

going to bed for now instead of drawing yet because its late and also naturally i am sick 👍 plany of time to draw later. its fine. its fine <3 its fine