Christchurch's playground elephant: demure, unassuming, shaped like a friend Oamaru's playground elephant: ready for the next Punic war

(dragging the video onto the internet with the big hook) here it is folks

we're returning Renfield to his natural habitat... England (a barn owl swoops down and carries him off in its talons)

my new niche 'back in my day' complaint is that when i was a teen making AMVs i swear i could brute force basically any format into the editor, and now if anything is in a slightly wrong codec the editor starts crying and asks for it to be reencoded.

i used to work at a telco call centre, and from having to file fault tickets back then i've still got a reasonable sense of what's causing issues when i have network trouble with something now

YEAHHHHHH they've finally republished Blackwater in something other than a wristbreaking hardback let's go let's go

deeply frustrating to reach the bottom of what should be a much larger pool of books after only four books I've been reading comp stuff for Drac research purposes and the shallow well is... 1) adult horror fiction 2) with a trans masc protag 3) who's not a teenager or in a school setting

Lal just told me they think 'every romcom is 50 First Dates'

I'm back in the Giallo mines

love to write a self-serving motive rant where the character knows if they were honest they'd come off badly so they gotta get reeeally inventive with that explanation

sometimes when I'm doing my 'does this word exist in 1930s English' checks I'll discover really weird exceptions like... apparently 'skosh' is a bastardisation of 'sukoshi' from the post-WWII occupation of Japan?? Which I never would've thought of! It sounds like it should be an onomatopoeia!

hosted a Halloween movie night tonight and the coolest movie of the evening was... Cemetery Man total fever dream full of abrasively weird characters and 'plot' beats that nevertheless had the energy and the visual style to make it work?? I was confused the whole way through but I had a blast

Happy Halloween! 🎃🦇🕯️

finally read Piranesi, which was delightful, and also made me nod and go 'yeah...' a lot as someone who spent a year alone in lockdown as a grad student studying the actual Piranesi

my favourite people are antique tech restorationists who make videos showing how the equipment works... I owe you my life, everyone recording their 1920s lamps and speakers and cars in use

finally had a use for some notes I wrote back in 2018 on 19th century peasant economics and the pages with the info for the years I need are missing...

They're practicing calligraphy! 🐦‍⬛🪶

vision: realised variables: more than 21 in fact excited for people to play this scene and find all the weird little nooks and crannies they can get into! happy with how it turned out 🫶

the fun thing about history is that sometimes a question like 'what was the typical school leaving age for aspirational british middle class girls in the 1910s' will have a really, really complicated answer. the unfun thing is sometimes you just needed a simple answer fast for backstory purposes

one of the reasons I was so set on Drac doing JVN-style character routes rather than romance scenes interspersed along a single plot is that there's nothing quite as good as when the LIs hate each other and cause problems when you're not with them

"I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Remembering the incredible work of the late great Bernie Wrightson on his birthday 🖤

Grow new connections in the middle of nowhere with this bittersweet cozy story. Delphinium is now LIVE on Kickstarter 💙🌿

Trials and Tribulations time! This is the one I've been most excited for because Mia is my favourite (aside from Edgeworth). Keen to finally learn what her deal is!

i've spent the entirety of today like 'i'll write until i get bored of it and then do something relaxing' but... i have not gotten bored of the writing

Frankenstein! It was half a really engaging and cool take on the material, and half one of the most boring takes on the material I've ever seen

realising the vision will require synthesising 21 different tracked variable checks into a smooth conversation. realising the vision is back on hold until i've made a chart.

LETS FUCKING GAUUUUURRRRR!!!! ITS OUT NOW YOU CAN PLAY IT RIGHT NOW IN IT'S FULL GLORY!!!

"You two can be the family you were always meant to be, free from the sins of generations past, if you let me do what needs doing." Scarlet Hollow Episode 5 releases in February, on Friday the Thirteenth. A huge shout out to our friends at @smallbu.bsky.social for animating this trailer!

working on one of the scenes for drac that's been a fully formed part of the concept for like five years and phwoar. love to realise the vision.

Drăculești, @fine-fiends.bsky.social (TBA)

an emotion video games are uniquely capable of evoking is 'the boys are back in town'

one of the narrative design things i find hardest in a branching narrative is figuring out 'exclusivity of information' if you put important (but inessential) details in a limited number of paths, it can feel rewarding for players to find them, but the more important the more of a risk it is.

american wizcock

I've been reading up on 1920s-30s British medical attitudes toward queer people. Please enjoy this excerpt:

the GDT Frankenstein reactions are making me think about how his (otherwise pretty good, don't get me wrong!) Hellboy adaptations really bent all the characters into a particular beauty-and-the-beast-narrative shape in a way that was like... fine? But I'm still bitter about the missed opportunity.

a fun part of getting into vinyl is when an artist structured their whole album around the sides and you get to actually appreciate how the songs are supposed to be connected or separated

for the low low price of plane ticket I will go away (to the Antarctic) (do real research) (touch the ice)

four horror movies that're 10/10s: hellraiser (1987), bones (2001), braindead (1992), the wicker man (1973)

onto Justice for All now, and these Ace Attorney games are alright ay, 2-2 is very satisfying so far

Visa and Mastercard have the opportunity to do something really funny.

no raiden, they're sensitive to the sun because they're bisexual

caught my vampire neighbor creeping through my front door. he claims my saying “for sure dude, we should definitely hang out sometime” the other night counts as an invitation, but I disagree. we’re on hold with the etiquette hotline

the big Parallels secret is that my boots got stuck together at one point and I couldn't stand up to hook someone and I felt like a cartoon villain frantically trying to detangle them in time. evil defeats itself etc.

if any out of town pals are still around today and want to say hi, lmk 👀 otherwise I'll just be wandering in a fugue state and touching grass

what a lovely MIGW that was 🎉 thanks again everyone for coming to Parallels, and all the folks I hung out with throughout the week outside of that

THERE'S A RENFIELD COSPLAYER AT PAX?? OH MY GOD??????

pollen so bad today that I accidentally took a double dose of antihistamines and I'm still coughing