Wobbledogs: The Game Where You Wobble Some Dogs

Look man, sometimes you just need a game where you breed multi-headed, brashly-coloured dogs that can barely walk. Sometimes you need to pick those dogs up and fling them about the place. Sometimes that's the only thing that really helps.

Enter: Wobbledogs. A bright and colourful, CalArts-adjacent wonder in which dogs lay eggs and machines pump out slices of yummy garlic bread. It's a simple, addictive sandbox game, and your only task is to bring dogs to life, and watch them shit out neat pink poo piles.

Much of the fun comes in breeding them. At first they are beautifully simple little cartoon creatures with respectable rectangular bodies. But very soon they are mutated freaks, lunging and falling over and making horrible grimaces. They are undoubtedly in great pain. Yet they are charming. They're weird. The first time you grow a dog with a fluffy tail, you'll gasp. The sweet wonder of life made new again.

What I love about Wobbledogs is that those dogs are a sort of alien approximation of what a dog might be. They are facsimiles of dogs. They can have wings and tendrils and many heads. They lay eggs. They spin themselves into cocoons which hatch new, slightly mutated versions of the previous dogs.

Yet, for all this eldritch and un-doglike behaviour, they eat and play and snarl and defecate, and you, the player, watch silently. Hatch a new dog egg, why don't you? It'll be fun.

There's a love letter to the sciences in this that shines through even in the colouring, which reminds me of the bold, toddler-friendly sections you can find in most good science museums. The perfect reminder of the sheer fun and delight to be found in genetics. It's funny, really, that I can take generations of mangled mutts and craft them into the perfect tiny-headed, long-legged block of cuteness.

I made this dog. Now I shall wobble it. Good day. 

I've Got my Eye on You

The wonderful thing that you can do with a scanner, its uniquely mesmerising ability, is: warp.

Take me, for example, a normal woman with normal-shaped eyes. I can drag my face along the scanner, following the beam of light, and turn my eyes into long shadows. The result is a moderately spooky image.

This is the true joy of making an image via some progressive means. Panorama modes on phones can do pretty interesting things too, but the scanner is so much more controllable. It sits still, and you have to move. This means that you can effect a sort of theatrical, slow dance with the scanner. The glass and the line of light create a tiny stage for you.

The rapid blurring and dimming of any element of your scanned object that isn't directly touching the glass really adds to the startling sense of wrongness that can occur. It's not just the weird segmenting of the image as the scanner-beam moves across the glass that makes for a gorgeously distorted image, but also the fact that the beautiful clarity a scan can offer only goes so far when you're scanning something 3D.

It gives the arresting effect of emerging from the darkness. The world is so narrow. The shadow is so thick. Here I am - looking in.

More Junk

Here are some more pages of my junk journal, including this sensational collage featuring a photo of my aunt, Lindsay:

For some reason, her own aunt sent her a framed picture of herself some time ago. A beautiful present. A picture of yourself. Everyone wants this. But recently, Lindsay decided to put various framed images up on her walls, and so re-used the old frame and gave me the photo of her standing on the rocks. I knew what I had to do with this image. That's prime junk.

I think my favourite aspect of it is that the picture itself is quite low-quality. There are not that many pixels in there. Perfect.

Other pages have been largely filled up with packaging from various treats I've been having - my important Christmas chocolate orange (which was, in fact, mint flavoured), and selected teas, fruits, yoghurts, etc. I quite like incorporating this sort of waste scrap into collages - it becomes a sort of weird diary of supermarket foods, not the kind of thing I'd usually document, but obviously quite a large part of life. Something about looking back on those things is quite satisfying.

I've been using this journal as a regular notebook before collaging over all those initial notes, and so I also started incorporating the notes into the altered pages. It's a nice way to essentially use the same notebook twice, and I like the way it adds to the thoughtless messiness of the thing.

It's as if my thoughts give way to a scrambled, textured set of memories, which is a pretty fun representation of how thoughts really travel and recede. My thoughts are now - as they should be - on my next teabag.

My New Favourite Song: You're So High by Eli & Fur

I have become obsessed with a brooding dance track I heard in a restaurant. This is how it happens. This is how I get into house.

That's Eli & Fur.

Let me set the scene. I'm in the concrete basement of a Japanese restaurant. A woman at the only other occupied table in the room has told me about her Groupon voucher, and how she often visits new restaurants via the beautiful deals available to her on Groupon. The waitress is also in very high spirits, laughing often. I have just consumed a good amount of sushi and sashimi, and there is some kind of marinated bass dish on its way. I have consumed a drink called 'matcha dream'. The ambience is good - the dim lights and all of the fish already in my stomach are making me nice and sleepy. And the songs are soft club tunes, which adds to that hazy feeling. We are not in the club, but the club is in us, the people in this room.

And then a new song starts, with a bold rhythmic synth and a mountain of echo, a sequence of distant exhales, and some classic claps for percussion. "You're so high," sings a woman who sounds as if she is emerging from a foggy lake. "Do you think of my heart?"

A bassy synth kicks in, and it is impossible for me to resist the music. By the time the chorus arrives, and the woman sings, "hey hey, I need a love right now" I am lost in the undulating, reverb saturated bliss of it. I feel as if I have entered a cloud. It's like when you're falling asleep and the pure relaxed pleasure of the process subsumes you. This is pure dreaming music.

I found out later that this song was You're So High by dance duo Eli & Fur, a 2013 debut track that apparently reached the top 3 on Hype Machine. At around that time, I was really into Hype Machine, but I had no idea it was still going strong to this day. Good for you, Hype Machine. Love you.

They describe themselves as 'platonic soulmates' on the about page of their website, which is pretty funny. Okay ladies. Well, in fairness, I did see them and think "oh, lesbians?" I stand corrected. This page also talks about a 2024 album in future tense, so I guess they haven't updated the site in a while.

I thought they might be lesbians because... they look really cool.

Anyway, the point is: I am going to listen to this five thousand times. Bye. 

I Saw the Totoro Musical

They did it. Those madlads actually brought huge, fuzzy freak Totoro to the West End, to a sort of musical-light show at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, where I once saw Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella before it transferred to Broadway and became BAD Cinderella (a truly iconic and insane move).

Bloke spotted.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this, because shows aimed at kids can often veer towards the predictable and bland. I'd seen a few pictures from past My Neighbour Totoro performances, and the puppets and sets looked really cool, but as far as the story's translation to the stage was concerned, I had modest expectations.

Sure enough, the sight of two adult women playing bombastic, screaming children took a little bit of getting used to. Sometimes I feel like this sort of thing works better through the TV than on the stage, somehow. Looking at real people in person can change something about the believability of the performance, or my ability to suspend my disbelief for this, and there are a few scenes in particular (one where Mei sits on the ground and cries in that stop-start way that tiny children do, for example) during which I thought, unstoppably: that's a woman.

Women alert!

It's kind of a strange thing - and also perhaps worth noting that there was no child in sight in the audience - but after a while I more-or-less forgot about it, especially with Mei, because her actress, Victoria Chen, really channeled the pure energy of a four year old. She had some absolutely perfect small child expressions. I was convinced.

Photo via Victoria Chen's Instagram, @vhickles.

The biggest star of the show is the big man himself, of course, and he looks phenomenal. Totoro is some sort of balloon puppet creature, and his movement is so smooth and impressive. When he grins, you grin. When he roars, you sit in silent reverence. This guy is great.

Large.

There are so many gorgeously designed elements of the show - numerous puppets, and beautiful sets that are moved in very inventive ways that really propel the narrative. There's some new sort of visual delight to be seen almost always, and let me tell you, when Catbus arrived, its headlight eyes casting frightening beams of light through the darkness of the stalls, I gasped.

The gorgeous inflated feline bus entranced me. I couldn't resist it.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I did enjoy the show. The thing is a glorious spectacle. It's cute, it has some good little moments of humour, and quite frankly, it's Totoro. 

I loved it. 

***

The photos used in this post are from various productions.

Darren Aronofsky's AI Madness

It came to my attention recently that noted freak director Darren Aronofsky has made some short films from crunched up AI-generated scenes for TIME Magazine's YouTube channel. They concern snippets of early American history, and look a little something like this:

Okay, eww. What's going on here?

In the first one, January 1: The Flag, we see sexy old legend George Washington raise the Continental Union Flag (or the Grand Union Flag, if you like) at Prospect Hill in what was then Charlestown, Boston, to the shock and awe of onlookers.

The first (unofficial) flag of the United States. In all its AI glory.

This seems to spook and hurt the British, possibly because the British Forces in the area were at this time surrounded, but interestingly, the reaction of stilled dismay that the film attempts to show (all emotions are sort of blunted and still in these AI renderings, it's like watching the facial skin of a corpse shift slightly underwater and calling that an expression) is less interesting than the one documented by George Washington in a letter to Joseph Reed on the 4th of January:

"We are at length favored with the sight of his majesty's most gracious speech breathing sentiments of tenderness and compassion for his deluded American subjects; the speech I send you (a volume of them was sent out by the Boston gentry), and farcical enough we gave great joy to them without knowing or intending it, for on that day (the 2d) which gave being to our new army; but before the proclamation came to hand we hoisted the union flag in compliment to the United Colonies. But behold it was received at Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission.
By this time I presume they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines."

                - via Our Flag: Origin and Progress of the Flag of the United States of America,                                    by George Henry Preble.

Those British buffoons interpreted this sign of reverence for the thirteen colonies as a compliment to the king. Incredible.

Of course, they figured out quickly enough what this flag-raising was really all about - America slay, Britain nay - but isn't this reaction so much funnier, and even a better patriotic story, than its straightforward alternative? I'm struck by the flattening of a genuinely interesting historical moment, with its odd little false assumption, and George Washington's sneering, delighted mockery of that, washed away so we can instead watch AI's limp version of the beginnings of a frown on an old man.

My favourite moment, in any case, is the delivery of the line, "stripes... thirteen of them" at about 2:42. There is a slight Disney villain quality to it that I enjoy, provided to us by, not AI, but a real voice actor. Thank you to that man.

The Allure of the Dog

I don't know when it happened to me, when I became such a dog depicter, but it seems like they're the animal I draw most these days. I still think of the classic bunny as my number one creature, the iconic ME symbol, but the dogs just come out. They just happen to me.

I think it's probably because of the wobbly lines I tend to adopt. I do this for dogs, but usually not the other animals. Dogs are just curly to me. They are curly little spaniels, very much based on my aunt and uncle's dogs.

The dogs in question.

I just love a wobbly line too much. It's too enticing. The gorgeous wiggle of it all. We need that.

I forgot the L in wiggly because I was just too excited. Forgive me.

Any animal can have it, in theory - that lumpy, curly quality - but it's the dog that has attached itself to the curls in my mind. The dog is the ultimate sidekick animal, in many respects, and the dog is also one of the most insane pets. There is a bespoke goofiness to the dog. One cannot deny this.

The long, discerning snout also appeals to me. That nose can become the perfect prodding stick, an investigative device, a kind of visual representation of the great, inspiring sense of smell and stink.

I'm not actually the biggest dog fan in the world. I grew up with cats, and so my destiny was to be a bit more of a cat person. But in art, the dog has an incredible humanity to it, and for some reason, in my mind, a probing, lucid gaze. Not to mention that fluffed up, eternally wagging tail.

It's a dog world. What can I say?