I watched Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower this evening which I've been meaning to watch for a bout 13 years. I regret not tracking it down much sooner, what a beautiful, brutal movie. An instant favourite. There's a lot to treasure here but Gong Li's costuming is burned into my soul.

Catching up with the reviews for One Battle After Another and it's a great filter to just ignore any critic who starts by talking about a film's budget and the studios finances at the beginning of the review.

Fear & Hunger's premise of "What if Griffith was rescued and then took on the God Hand?" Is incredibly hackish but the game makes it work by giving us the answer "Everyone would die in the most awful ways imaginable."

Playing through Fear & Hunger and this game feels like the most accurate version of how a traditional; "Dungeon Crawl" would go in that you just have you limbs cut off and die from tetanus while crawling away from maniacally laughing head of an evil wizard. 10/10 game so far.

Staying strong in my belief that England is a cursed land where nothing good can ever grow.

I always pictured Ligotti's stories taking place in a some industrial slump town made of stained concrete and rusted iron. Somewhere that resembled the decaying factory towns I grew up near. But looking at actual photos of Detroit all I see is endless American suburbia which looks more inhuman.

I managed to see Weapons just before it left the cinema here. I know I'm late to the party but I really enjoyed it. It managed to thread the needle between being suspenseful and then very funny at times. I loved the shifting perspectives following various threads to a really fun climax.

I don't think it's a good sign for the future of humanity that if I open the app store on my phone half of the top recommended apps are AI digital girlfriends.

I managed to get my hands on this! I'm very excited to read it, one of the few Thomas Ligotti books I haven't read yet.

Waking up and finding out that the government has quite casually removed all trans people's rights is painful enough. But having to watch as all the most rancid bigots on either side of the Atlantic celebrate the pain and misery they've caused is unbearable.

I spent over ten hours travelling yesterday to see a doctor so that he could tell me that if I get my testicles removed I will be unable to have children. (This is the second time I've had to travel to see a doctor and be told this) I had to restrain myself from replying by just reciting Kafka.

I'm genuinely a bit surprised at how the "romantasy" genre seems to have taken over fantasy lit but there's been almost no effort to court that audience from Hollywood or the games industry. I feel sure that whoever makes a gacha/dating sim about collecting a harem of fairy boys would outsell CoD.

I got to see The People's Joker in cinema last night, which was pretty neat. Probably the only Joker movie I'll ever watch and while it wasn't really my kind of film I did have fun seeing it with the dolls.

This just looks like a group of background characters from Xavier Renegade Angel.

I'm used to great works of art having awful fanbases but there's something special in the way the average Berserk fan fails to appreciate the actual manga.

My obsession with Nietzsche has led me to start reading up on the Greek worship of Dionysos. Which is incredibly frustrating as a trans person because Dionysos was frequently depicted as an androgynous cross dresser but this aspect seems to be of no interest to the academics who write about him.

Hadn't really paid attention to Ethel Cain but dropping a video titled "My Favourite Types of Gay Porn" followed by an album of depressing drone music is enough to make me a diehard fan.

Every time I tell someone from my gender clinic I wish I looked more feminine they get surprised and confused. They turn into Socrates and start going "Well what does 'looking like a woman' even mean?" like it's not their fucking job to help people transition.

It's hard to overstate how much David Lynch's films mean to me. Some of my happiest memories as a teen are being introduced to his works by a boy I had a crush on. And later taking a girl who had a crush on me to see Wild at Heart in the cinema. Farewell to one of the great artists of our times.

Currently working my way through Alan and Steve Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. It's an absolutely beautiful book and I'm enjoying it a lot even if I find myself unconvinced by this kind of syncretic esotericism.

When I was a teenager I was a very STEM brained child. I wanted to learn as much hard science as possible and being vaguely contemptuous of the humanities. As an adult though my biggest regret in education is not spending more time learning Ancient Greek and studying Art History.

Got a nice new dress!

Seeing Nosferatu on a big screen was one of the best cinema experience I've had in a long time. The movie is so powerful that it made me genuinely scared, it was like watching horror films as a child. I had my hand on my mouth so I wouldn't scream. Five stars.

Finding out that Gareth Evans is working on a new film starring Tom Hardy but it's being done for Netflix. Kino is dead in this world.

Reading about how the composer Alban Berg fell into a deep depression when his opera Wozzeck was a huge success. He had believed that the audiences of the time were incapable of recognising great music and felt that the opera's popularity was proof of its mediocrity but his failure as a artist.

I really like the basic idea of musicals but there's only a handful of them I actually enjoy because I just can't stand the Broadway style of songs that they all go for. Give me a musical written by Electric Wizard please.

I went to see The Devil Rides Out in the cinema last night. It's far from my favourite of Hammer's output but it is a really fun occult adventure movie with a great performance from Christopher Lee as a heroic character (always a treat). I love that my local cinema puts things like this on.

Really enjoying Alan Moore's new book. The subject matter is pretty well covered ground by him at this point (occultism, metafiction, psycho-geography of London) but he's still most interesting writer England has on offer right now and I'm happy to see where he's going.

I am alive.

Found out there's a new Alan Moore book out today and I rushed out to pick it up immediately. Really looking forward to reading this.

Hey sorry I haven't been around for months. I've been getting really into fighting games and spent most of my time getting beaten by zoomers with lightning fast reaction times and gen x guys who practiced dragon punch inputs on arcade cabinets in the 90s.

Happy Birthday to Thomas Ligotti. The best author of the worst worlds.

Me and a friend are playing through God Hand in 2024 and this might be the greatest video game of all time.

I decided that I haven't read enough manga so I'm getting into Dai Dark. Dorohedoro was great and from what I've seen of Dai Dark it looks absolutely sick.

RIP Roger Corman. His adaptation of the Masque of the Red Death is one of the best and most beautiful horror films ever made.

Tricking myself into liking superhero movies by calling them "Western Tokusatsus".

I'm getting the urge to rewatch Tarsem's Immortals for the first time since seeing it in the cinema. It's bit a movie I've seen anyone talk about in a decade but I remember enjoying it, taking myself to see it for my 20th birthday.

I'm wanting to get more into martial arts movies but didn't know where to start so I just went to a shop and grabbed two Hong Kong movies with cool covers. I trust this strategy will pay off.

Playing God Hand with a friend and I genuinely miss the era where video game plots were about Grappler Baki OCs suplexing every monster from Christian esotericism.

With the success of the Fallout and Last of Us TV shows I hope the studios remember the video game series that deserves a TV adaptation more than any other: The Legacy of Kain.

Falling into an abyss of embarrassment upon finding out that what I thought was an underrated song by an indie band was actually just a cover of a famous song by a respected artist.

Hearing that executives think that Coppola's Megalopolis is too strange and out there to be marketed is actually the best form of marketing for me.

A friend is showing me the Avatar series (yeah I'm about 20 years late to the party). It's good but it's making me realise I have barely watched any actual martial arts films, just homages and pastiches.

I'm getting a terrible urge to cosplay as Feyd-Rautha as drawn by Moebius.

It looks like Hollywood is definitely going to start pushing AI as part of films soon. It's a shame but I can spend the rest of my life watching old Italian and Hong Kong movies. I don't need that garbage.

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti

Evil messianic twinks of science fantasy.

Saw Dune part 2 and while it's visually striking and I think the action scenes were pretty great I think dropping all of the ecological and political themes from the book really hollow out the story.

With Dune coming back in fashion I hope we get more interest in other esoteric works of science fantasy. I am full Retvrn for this style of book.

Happy birthday to David Cronenberg, one of the greatest to ever do it. He's directed more masterpieces than I can list here. Seeing Crimes of the Future in the cinema was an absolute privilege and I hope continues working for years to come.