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“Ταῦρος δράκοντος καὶ πατὴρ ταύρου δράκων. Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco. A bull has begotten a dragon, and a dragon a bull. Ταύρος είναι ο πατέρας του φιδιού και του ταύρου πατέρας το φίδι.”

— Clement of Alexandria.

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Well, Americans, it was nice knowing you

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Video game that has an easy/medium/hard difficulty setting but no matter what you pick the gameplay is unaffected. instead on easy the story is really obvious and text boxes pop up that say things like "Villainman is the bad guy. Abducting the princess is an evil action."

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you guys remember the Woody Collective?

that was weird

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have any of you guys heard of kyūsai no gihō by susumu hirasawa. i think you should listen to kyūsai no gihō by susumu hirasawa.

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BURNING SKY -- a game concept + prototype

I am making, conceptualizing, pondering a GAME. Full post on my little site but here's the transcript.

Logic is shattered.

In a world without rules, we make our own order: language and memory.

1. SETTING

The idea came as I was struggling with a course on philosophy of logic, and a paper on truth deflationism was giving me trouble.

So I tried to imagine a world where logic is a law more real than the laws of physics. And logic, philosophers say, can be changed.

And now I think I finally know how to tell stories about this world (an earlier attempt here).

2. PREMISE

Rules of the world are unstable. A special language helps keep them together, but only locally and only for a short while. Powers That Be hire mercenaries and adventurers to retrieve more words and seize control over the heartbeat of the world.

Also, Moon is bleeding. Don't worry about that.

The difficult thing about it is making place for all its abstract things and logical gymnastics. I am not entirely sure contradictions can even be depicted! So I resort to symbolic representations: card, icons, and long-winded descriptions, all put to motion with the power of player’s ✨imagination✨.

4. PITCH PRESENTATION

I want to be realistic with the project goals (and unrealistic with its message), so the structure is a card-based roguelike.

Here’s the first twist: inspired heavily by the Weather Factory games, the deck is not just your weapons and spells. It’s you. Memories, feelings, inclinations — even wounds and fears. And there will be circumstances where you’d want to use even those!

And here’s the second twist: the obstacle is not an enemy (or, well, not always an enemy). It is a problem on your way, packaged as a short standalone encounter, old-fashioned TTRPG-style. To solve it, use whatever you have!

In other words, this game is a roguelike point-and-click puzzle with RPG elements.

And a very early, very rough mechanical prototype of this game can be found right here.

Now for the boring part. As much as my eyes light up at the above, this is hardly lucrative. Right now I put it forth and will refer back to it as updates come along! But if this sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy, please let me know! Feedback is very encouraging.

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Contradiction -- short story

Wrote it a while ago but need as a reference for another post so An exploration in what it would feel like to encounter a paradox feat. overt gender themes

Written in 2023 Conceptualized in 2022 Posted by my then-uni in 2024 #timeshenanigans

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trying to make videogames ✔️

learning to make music ✔️

homestuck reference ✔️

back to this website ✔️

i too have become a stereotype

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eagle: so what do you think about stigmata

prometheus: you know we're in a pre-christian myth, right? like that word doesn't exist yet. your dumb joke is anachronistic.

eagle: stigma talons in your flesh

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I wonder why that reviewer sees this as a lack of understanding and not a negative stance.

Besides, the supposedly disorganized masses are seen in organized action at several times. Old men of Nausicaa’s village show a great deal of resolve as hostages, then return and steal a tank; a young Pejite girl replaces the captured Nausicaa; the entire Valley evacuates, clearly self-organized; not to mention the self-organized and efficient mold-cleaning.

when i first read nausicaa i thought at the end they would abolish the monarchies. oh how naive sweet little me was

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you’re telling me a bimbo wheat this bread?

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"The Homeric narrator does not make the common modern assumption that the closest and most important relationships must be sexual and does not assume any particular connection between sex and intimacy. The most detailed sex scene in The Iliad — the vivid comic episode in Book 14 where Hera seduces Zeus to distract him from battle with a solid nap afterwards — shows how sex can be weaponized. Sex between Hera and Zeus measures their distance, not their closeness. We glimpse, in the brief sex scene in Book 3 between the impassioned Paris and the reluctant Helen, that sex can be both nonconsensual and anticlimactic; the buildup is full of drama and extraordinarily momentous (in that this scene serves as a replay of the original abduction of Helen), but the actual sex is formulaic and finished in a single line. The Iliad marks out its areas of interest, in the public sphere, communities, and warfare, and its relative lack of interest in the spheres presided over by Aphrodite, the weakest and most ridiculous deity on the battlefield. The marginalization of sexual desire (erōs) as a topic for poetry is part of The Iliad’s definition of its own generic identity, with its focus on grand, mythical wars, gods, heroes, and mortality — in contrast to the kinds of archaic Greek lyric poetry that focused on desire, love, marriage, or pleasure, of which we have extant examples in the fragmentary poems of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Mimnermus...

In the most extreme moments of his grief for his most beloved person, Achilles presents Patroclus not as his child, parent, or wife, but as himself.

The ultimate form of love is to see no difference between the self and the beloved. Patroclus’ journey into battle wearing the armor of Achilles transforms him into his friend, in the eyes of the Trojans. He becomes Achilles also, tragically, in his violent death before the walls of Troy, killed by Trojans through the help of Apollo, just as Achilles soon will be. Once Patroclus is dead, Achilles tries to transform himself into his dead friend, by rolling in the dust and, like a dead man, abstaining from food, sleep, or sex. He anticipates joining Patroclus again, and becoming indistinguishable from him in death, when their bones are together in one jar."

- Emily Wilson, from the introduction to her translation of The Iliad, 2023.

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feminine urge to chase after people screaming “I will gnaw at your neck and drink your marrow”

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Goncharov dir. Martin Scorsese

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shout out to the abyss and also delusions

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shout out to the abyss and also delusions