yompthoria

[yompthoria]

This is me every time my phone auto-capitalizes god or suggests to capitalize god.

Like......... on one hand it is a way of distancing myself from the constant crush of my society's omnipresent dominant religious leanings via deliberate refusal to entertain the idea of a singular, specific, dualistic, monotheistic, capitalization-requiring god who must be referred to as an almighty personlike entity with a name. I do not want to go out of my way to respect that one culturally mandated interpretation of how we should talk about the concept of god or have the technology I use nag me into religiously motivated capitalization patterns that do not feel authentic to me. But it's also the sort of thing where I don't feel like it's born from an impulse of disrespect, either. I just have a very different philosophical orientation and spiritual background around this sort of thing.

The closest I've gotten to describing my own spirituality over the years is something like agnostic pantheism and secular humanism shaped by my mother's psychology focused self-inquiry based spiritual practices, my dad's background in philosophy, my grandmother having been a Zen Buddhist for a long time, my high school experience with being in a hippie new agey youth group in which there were a lot of people feeling out a larger spiritual space with the framing of like, traditionally Christian terminology alongside their growing vocabularies from different spiritual perspectives, and other stuff related to my fascination with how the universe works and the blunt and often baffling realities of what it means to exist in it.

Part of what motivates me to push back against the social norm of god capitalization is this gut deep insistance that I ought to make space for kinds of god that don't ask to be elevated up somewhere as separate from the rest of reality, separate from the rest of the words in the sentence, or to be personified and opinionated. I want there to be room for kinds of god that are non-dualistic and weird and distinctly non-Christian in flavor. I think what uncapitalizing god communicates and expresses for me is how natural it feels to treat it as not needing to be worshipped or exceptionalized, and the part this plays in deconstructing all the religious scaffolding and loaded framing that organized religion puts around it. This is also an aspect of why I avoid pronouns, use it/its, or go full pronoun anarchy with god when talking about the concept or some interpretation of it. At the end of the day, this word "god" is only one point of reference on something that could very well be very hard to understand in its entirety.

Are you ever typing something that your phone autocapitalizes and you go back and re-type it just to force uncapitalize it. Like no sorry mcdonalds doesn’t deserve that level of respect from me

[yompthoria]

the blogger's sensitive "posting organ" can be thought of as a kind of udder

[yompthoria]

Existential Torso Compilation progress log, May 31st 2025, mid-afternoon

Today I'm gonna share some of the raw illustration assets I've been drawing for my experimental zine book thingy project about weird body stuff, living in an era of body fascism, bodily change, personal transformation, biophilosophy, modular creature construction, and other things. In the context of making pages for the zinebookthingy, I basically bring each asset into my photoshop project and arrange it on a page/background, where I might do some additional things to make the image comfy so it's less likely to overextend beyond the boundaries of page gutters/page bleed. From there I seed it with poetry and essays and writings and graphic design stuff. I'll post some pictures of fully finished pages at some point later.

[yompthoria]

I'm reading A Masterpiece In Disarray: An Oral History of David Lynch's Dune, and some of the things I'm learning are REALLY amusing/interesting to me.

David Lynch beefed with HR Giger over the design for the chestburster from Alien because he thought that Giger took too much inspiration from the Eraserhead baby when designing it. This led to Lynch totally excluding Giger from his adaptation of Dune, even though Giger was famously involved in making very unique and cool concept art for the Jodorowsky version of Dune that imploded. Giger, when asked about this beef, basically commented: "He really loves his baby."

He really loves his baby.... he loves it. He protecc the baby.

Val Kilmer was originally totally set to play Paul Atreides and was in the role pretty deep into pre-production, but then various people, including the film's producer Raffaella DeLaurentiis, started having doubts, so they scouted for alternatives. This is when Kyle Maclachlan, who was initially just a small-scale, relatively unknown theater actor, but who was absolutely the biggest Dune fanboy ever, came into the picture, stumbling into the role as a coveted sudden recast.

The thing about Lynch's casting style for Dune was that he was super vibes based, putting faith in his intuition and his casting director's pipeline and not doing extensive auditions or readings when he met his prospective cast in person, instead focusing on talking to them to see if he connected with them personally and could work with/direct them. And it just so happened that he really hit it off with Kyle Maclachlan this way! In addition to Mclachlan having a distinctly different vibe from Kilmer that people thought served the vibe of Paul Atreides better, this rapport really cinched the deal on the recasting.

Friendship ended with Val Kilmer, Kyle Maclachlan is now my best friend Paul Atreides.

Some people quoted in the oral history speculated that Lynch cast Maclachlan because the two of them were exactly alike (from a similar background with a similar disposition) and even visually looked the same, like they were cousins or something, in a way that felt comfortingly familiar to Lynch. The author of the book, Max Evry, joked to one of the rejected possible Pauls, (paraphrasing from memory) "Do you think David Lynch would have picked you for the role if you looked more like him?" The actor he was talking to seemed to have a different theory, related to him not getting to actually show off his acting in person, but didn't entirely dismiss the question.

Some people think the idea of David Lynch casting Kyle Maclachlan due to them being clones of each other is totally bogus or greatly exaggerated. This is extremely valid and non-sensationalistic. The two generally have distinct differences despite their similarities. The clone-casting theory is still extremely amusing to me in concept, though, because it's so conspiracy-board-able and whimsical in a freudian pop psychology way. I think I can understand why some people are so into the Lynch-clone theory. Like, all you need to do is find one picture where Lynch and Maclachlan look alike, and then you can just vibe-check yourself with it over and over again until you're raving like Alex Jones. I did this to myself inside a compartmentalized area of my psyche as a thought exercise and it was pretty fun.

The fun thing about the format of the book is that as an oral history, the bulk of it is interviews with the cast and crew and people adjacent to it, and it reads very much like the transcript of a very interview driven documentary that cuts between different interviews and juxtaposes contradictory opinions/perspectives. So, sometimes it's like certain people are arguing with each other from totally different rooms.

I'm still reading this book. Perhaps I shall return later with more liveblogging.

[yompthoria]

My deep dark secret (which I first disclosed as a comment on a post somewhere, and now feels less like a deep dark secret and more like something I should actually whip out at parties) is that I like to mentally play around with the idea of experimenting with ne/nem/ner pronouns but don't feel socially comfortable taking full ownership of that even in spaces that are amenable to this concept, so instead I am worldbuilding a story universe in which there are sentient plants, and entities that speak tend to refer to those plant people with ne/nem pronouns. My doofenshmirtz plan is to influence society with infomemetics and multimedia literature and then leap out from behind the curtains being like, "Behold, it is I, ne/nem, author of the plant neopronoun story. Tell me, has your subjective experience with encountering and using certain plant pronouns gotten a little easier? Yes? Ah, do I have some fun next steps for you!"

[yompthoria]

Throwback from 2013 in which I am a high schooler voice acting and sound designing stuff for one of my favorite webcomics. I actually used the same hellish screams soundscape that I used for my favorite high school era animated short, Stormforest.

All of the voices are mine, and most of the sound effects are from Soundbible.com and Mixcraft 6.0.  I really, really, really hope you enjoy!

[yompthoria]

I remember that I used to memorize RGB/HSL values or keep track of them in a word document because I didn't want to lose them in an ever-shifting array of MS Paint color tornadoes.

I remember that sometimes I didn't even want to pick a specific color, and I would basically play around with all the buttons, the valies, and the sliders like the whole thing was a fidget toy until I went "oooh, pretty color."

The UI is so crisp, high-contrast, and chiseled. I squint until my eyes are almost closed and everything is blurry, and I can still register all its shapes. Crunchy!

It's so satisfying to click and hold a button and see the pressed version with its identical but inverted bevel shading.

It's so satisfying to watch the dashed/dotted selection box travel over the mosaic of color option boxes. Each little encapsulation has a special essence to it.

I remember wondering about that bottom edge of the rainbow gamut. I'd drag the target down until it butted up against that chiseled edge. I focused on its descent and felt the color drain away to grey around me; calm, but sterile.

As a child I felt a unique kind of existential dread about that grey singularity in which every single color, no matter how bright and unique, would return to the same place, deep in that neutral uniform grey, basically beyond the confines of spacetime. Perhaps it connected to my need to catalogue those colors...

"Behold the grey singularity. Beyond its event horizon, you forget every color you ever loved."

Somehow I think it's possible to grow some kind of intuitive understanding of color theory by playing around with color pickers. Like, it starts out as just exploring, but eventually, as you keep moving it around and playing with it, you get muscle memory about the patterns you follow and begin to feel something about why your personal relationship with color creates those movements.

Windows 95 - Color Picker

[yompthoria]

Art time! This is a mixed media tradigital poetry illustrationy piece from 2025 called "Spawn of Polarity."

It is a digitally played-with, digitally colored collage of two pages of pencil sketches from my sketchbook.

It is also some cut-up internet screenshots that I put into the brain blender and reassembled into nonlinear magnetic poetry.

It is kind of about non-duality at its core, if that makes any sense out of context? Non-duality in general but also "embryos from emotional dimorphism" and ecologically significant demons and stuff like that.

This is one of my favorite pieces so far because it is a little deeper into my exploration of collage poetry illustrations and I went harder on both giving the illustration a particular moody ambience but also tried to be a little more sparse with the word collage in order to concentrate more meaning juice inside it without it getting cluttered or diluted, and I think it creates some neat stuff.

I love collage poetry so much.

I repeat this a lot when I talk about this but it feels SOOOO good to take my POV of the internet across a 2-week period or longer, let my intuition influence which screenshots I recue from the garbag pile, then put it in the fucking brain blender and see what happens when I free-associate new things from it.

I am no longer a passive consumer of internet opinions nor am I solely an individualistic beacon of internet opinions.... I synthesize! Synthesis! Synthesis!

One of my favorite conversations I've had with people about this piece while boothing at art markets was one that happened whilst meeting a someone who was dyslexic and noted that the non-linear format uniquely felt like how she reads and thinks related to writing. I wanna channel this SO hard. This convo inspired me SO much. I love connecting with people who have similar but different neurodivergent ways of interacting with things I make. I l o v e it.

Readable image description thingy under the cut in case you need it.

Art description from image alt text:

Strange creatures glisten in an autumn colored haze of red, orange, and green tendrils. Two creatures are small cylinders from which bud-shaped protrusion and long tentacley branching round-ended root systems grow. The biggest creature is a large pumpkin shaped fruit thing sliced open to reveal a vivid tangerine and blood orange colored inside full of granular seed-like pockets, and similar soft root tentacles poke into and grow into it like worms. An orange slice looking chunk of it floats nearby, leaking. Below these from left to right are a squishy floppy balloon sausage eared creature with a turtle shell, an anguished worm, another turtle shell creature variant with a mushroom cap shaped head and spindly long legs, a smaller turtle shell creature variant, a froglike face emerging from the tendrils, a weevil shaped disembodied head with nonsensical kinky legs, and another turtle shell creature variant with a long oblong face that is like 5 times the size of its body being ridden with a bridle and reins by a horned humanoid character.

The poetry between the drawings reads, in no particular order: "this demon produces a litmus test substance to care for his mind noise/ preternature.7.1.0001/ initiated to a larger group will that governs his species/ through this process he tends to collapse duality/ his welfare says demons are a vital tool of desire that generates other non-demon animals!/ with noise and glorified ambient preintellectual behavior/ seeing things as they are/ a holistic perception/align all 3 brains together/ seeing the spectrum/ varying degrees of masculine and feminine development overlapping/ he's already aware of a spiritual awakening/ the consummation of its body is the highest affirmation of his life/ the merging of polarity/ over a thousand embryos from emotional dimorphism/ for my friends man and animal instinct is experienced as it strives to percieve polarity/ we naturally start becoming a threat to categorization"

[yompthoria]

Feel [weird spooky understandings about the way that cruelty and trauma trickle through and permeate all aspects of dysfunctional and/or abusive systems] Games

Seeing this bundle actually immediately got me to play 1000xRESIST because I had been very loosely following dev updates for a while, and the implication that it could make me feel as brutally "good" as Mouthwashing did made my burgeoning curiosity overflow the curiosity-vessel that is my existence.

I am very fond of how we are sort of (well, hopefully?) heading into The Era for narrative games in which the Point of the game is Narrative Experience, often visceral, and the mechanics are designed through the lens of how to communicate or create narrative experience in creative ways.

Visual novels and other kinds of narrative games have always had a noticeable presence in video game fandom, and were legitimately a HUGE part of video game history and the origins of like, RPGs, but have often been pushed to the margins by like, tradgamers who don't get the point of a game being primarily about a story, or game being about walking places/traversal through intricately designed narrative set design, or a game being a multimedia reading experience with limited but intentional areas of interactivity.

It brings me joy to see that Mouthwashing is cross-pollinating its promotional stuff with other games like it.

I pulled an all-nighter while playing 1000xRESIST and only regret that all-nighter a little bit because.... IT'S SO GOOD...? I just couldn't stop playing because the Narrative Experience (tm) had my neck with a vice grip. I put like 20 hours into it.

Bang Bang Fire my beloved. She is my favorite character.

1000xRESIST feels very kindred to Disco Elysium in the sense that it's about coping with failed revolutions and grappling with the way revolutionary theory can fail due to human hubris or sabotage from outside opportunists, but its revolutions are a thousand times more personal considering it's also about familial cycles of abuse and like 90% of the characters are clones of the same traumatized, self-hating girl who was thrust into parenthood-via-self-cloning by her circumstances. It articulates something very interesting about authoritarianism and the link between authoritarian government and authoritarian parenting, and the link between failed revolutions and failing to stop the cycle of abuse within families. And it does this with a very Elysium-esque flavor of compassion, willingness to consider both the flaws and the humanity of characters who have objectively caused lots of harm, and while encouraging you as the player to still have hope, to still see beauty, to still keep trying, and to still keep resisting authoritarianism and unjust systems.

This specific thematic parallelism between family and government was slightly confusing at first (the game guides you back and forth between memories of different settings that start out with very different vibes and very different stakes) but as you play on, it starts to make SO much sense in a really cool way and the game joins these things together really creatively.

this is so funny i'm gonna throw up. hey everyone did you hear about the new false advertising bundle on steam

[yompthoria]

Much, much cowardice exists here in these poll results.

I think we really need to collectively acknowledge that diabolical old women who are mycologists are hot just in concept alone, and the formal creative articulation of this concept in the form of Hildy is even hotter.

She is handsome in a cool old lady who is confident in herself and Knows Things and does not care about stuff that isn't related to what she cares about kind of way. It says a lot that she's willing to wear her grey hair long and also style it with braids when a lot of older women her age start to cut it off because they want to distance themselves visually from the old crone/old hag archetype. This is a hotness enhancer.

This makes me feel a certain desire to do some fanart at some point in a way that proves once and for all that she is hot.

The tea kettle in this picture is an additional hotness enhancer.

I love how nobody in this show is drawn in a way that is traditionally hot or in any way that like, sexually emphasizes them, and the style itself is such an awesome kind of like, generally unflattering, yet so many of these characters are kinda hot anyways.

This art style is such an Eye style. So much very specific anatomical detail that normally is simplified or left out of cartoony styles is thrown into the mix (without being overwhelming) yet the eyes are kept so striking and simple, and somehow this contrast draws you super deep into the characters' eyes. It's like, the exact opposite proportion of detail allocation from anime, kinda, but used to similar effect.

Hildy's eyes are SO intense. This is yet another hotness enhancer.

I need multiple opinions so I dont look crazy,

[yompthoria]

Yeehaw! These are my contributions to this.

✨ HAPPY 4/20! ✨

the Psycholonials Art Collab was a huge success! thanks to everyone who participated 🤡 💕

liked the novel? consider joining the official discord server

some of the artists' social media pages can be found under the cut!

Z/Zhen, Sugarberry, Jollacrity https://bsky.app/profile/darksarts.bsky.social https://darks-arts.tumblr.com/

Abby/Abblepie, Uncle Imbroglio, Snatchlantern https://x.com/eros_santiago

Percy/Purse https://bsky.app/profile/hellonhound.bsky.social

David Hasselhoof https://morphimus.carrd.co/

Spaghettifeet, Maraudeville https://www.tumblr.com/pastabaguette

Leapfrog https://bsky.app/profile/knick-knasty.bsky.social

Pooch Roflcopter, Reginald Rumpus, Sugarberry VII, Top Jasmine https://www.tumblr.com/dreadful-home https://bsky.app/profile/dreadedender.bsky.social

Pumpernickel https://lostintherye.tumblr.com/

Deeznuts Cumberbund, Kween Kerfuffle https://www.tumblr.com/coccodoodles https://x.com/coccoderma https://www.instagram.com/naifangh/

Rascaltooth Hootenanny, Gumbo Stallone https://gumbamasta.newgrounds.com/

Filbuster Dampsaddle https://bsky.app/profile/tangyolive.bsky.social

Chancellor Poppycock, Chamomile Giddyup, Mince Limerick https://bsky.app/profile/aidenaces.bsky.social https://acesartblog.tumblr.com/

Umbrellope, Godhead Narrator Z https://x.com/kechmeifyoucan https://bsky.app/profile/kech.bsky.social

Dogfood Fiddlesticks https://www.tumblr.com/vampiricdoodles

Paddywhack Zanzibar, Nozzleburp https://www.yompthoria.com/ https://www.instagram.com/yompthoria/ https://www.tumblr.com/yompthoria

Mizzlebip https://zebruh.tumblr.com/

Turtleburger, Squeak Beaglepuss https://bsky.app/profile/cal-alidocious.bsky.social https://toyhou.se/cal_alidocious

Rubberlegs Scuccutash https://www.tumblr.com/mrk49635

Bumblegoose II, Lychee Weaboo https://ladymoog.carrd.co/

Pillbox Mumblebitch https://www.tumblr.com/maybetheyregiants

Weaselshoe https://linktr.ee/obliviousmystic

Riotus https://springselkie.tumblr.com/ https://bsky.app/profile/springselkie.bsky.social

Yonder Cerium https://www.tumblr.com/villainofcircumstance https://jade.moe/lichwitch

Cesmani Gances, Rollix, Flinderbud https://x.com/tvCompfy https://bsky.app/profile/tvcompfy.bsky.social