Exploring Wigglypaint

Wigglypaint is a cute little art tool that runs in-browser and allows you to make adorable animated drawings, like so:

Who is this?

I've seen it floating around the internet for a while, notably used by veryluckyclover, who makes endless charming, tiny drawings that I enjoy, and there's something so irresistable and distinctive about the look. Those lovely wobbly lines delight me.

I've long been a fan of 'boiling' - Roobarb and Custard was such a great stylistic influence, along with many 1970s-1990s animated series that incorporated similar styles and were everywhere when I was growing up, and so it's really satisfying to make these wiggling gifs without having to draw individual frames. They just wiggle naturally. Good.

I've also been really admiring Svdpony's Flipnote Studio 3D drawings, which have some lovely dithering and incorporation of small elements of animation, and seeing these reminded me how much I love Flipnote Studio 3D - although drawing on a 3DS cramps my hand pretty quickly.

So I thought, hmm, I should locate some more interesting drawings tools like this. Wigglypaint seems popular - I've seen a good amount of reels and shorts and TikToks about it - but what else is out there? What other strange and beautiful art tools await?

I like Wigglypaint quite a bit - the default colour palettes are nice, the small gifs it exports are perfect, and I love its bouncy noises. It is a bit restrictive - those exports are very small, but I like the ways it limits you. It is, unfortunately, horrible to use on an iPad or phone. Strangely, the easiest thing for me to do is use my trackpad, which does feel warped and wrong to say - but using it feels good and right.

What can I say? Wigglypaint rocks. More wiggly paintings incoming. 

My Plan for Learning 10,000 Japanese Words

I've been using Anki for years to idly study Japanese in a wonderfully unthinking way, and I use this one deck of Kanji cards in particular that I am now just under 900 cards away from completing. That may sound like an awful lot of cards, but we're talking completion within a year if I learn three new cards a day, which is very doable and thus I can no longer make excuses. I must finish the kanji deck. I will.

This kanji means 'harvest'.

As for the attached vocabulary deck, no, let's not talk about it. That one hurts.

This big nasty boy has just over ten thousand new cards for me to learn, which would mean an average new card rate of almost thirty per day if I wanted to learn it within a year. This is too much. Not least because it would be additional to those new kanji cards, and all other new cards across my other decks (which I will not discuss here in order to stay focused).

The stats for my kanji & vocab decks, respectively. Let's not talk about the 'relearning' segment.

***

So I think my plan is going to be to just to stick to those three new kanji cards each day and learn those - nice and leisurely. I can't get too sucked into spending an untenable amount of time on this (I very strictly keep my language study to one hour per day maximum, because it starts to massively get in the way of more important stuff once it creeps past that limit, in my experience), but three new cards a day is wonderfully relaxed.

Me. I'm weak. 私は弱いです。

And then in one beautiful year, when I've crunched those remaining kanji into my brain, I can get started on the big vocab quest. Maybe I'll opt for ten new vocab cards a day, which would get me to the finish line in about three years. That's a long time, but we're talking about ten thousand Japanese words slotted into my mind, both aurally and visually, so I'd be very satisfied by that timeline.

I've crunched these numbers a few times along the way so far, and I've found that adding more than ten new cards a day starts to get rapidly too much for me, so going for a four-year relatively chill goal that allows me to spend a reasonably minimal time per day on language seems like a good option.

Mmm... wheat.

Realistically, I should probably increase that first number (three new cards per day) so that I can dip the ten a bit lower later on, but I'll experiment with that and see how I feel. I think I sort of enjoy learning the vocab more, because there's more information to attach the memory to (I learn the sounds of the words), so it might be easier to study a higher number of new cards per day when I've moved away from the kanji. I don't know.

Either way, here's hoping I can cram that stuff into my brain! 

Tasks, and Such

I'm in a pure sleepy mode right now. I'm getting aggravated by small things, such as: the presence of dust. Does dust have to build up everywhere, all the time? Or is that something that happens just to piss me off? Will they ever invent a computer screen that stays slick and utterly clean? Or do I have to be reminded of the unstoppable grease and grime of living by my own gorgeous devices? Many of life's domestic realities can make one feel put-upon. I should not have born, I think, to clean stuff. I should be a worm writhing around in the soil, coated in the chunky ground I live in. Worms must be happy. They must surely live a life of envious dirty jubilance.

Anyway, lately I've felt good about my scheduling. I posted a video last month, and I'm on track to post a video this month too. This is my most important current goal - and I'm there. I can be the true video woman. I can post videos. Wow.

Another important task, of course: filling my sketchbook.

There are many distracting tasks, ailments, friends, and other things threatening me, always. You know, you've got to go shopping, and you've got to read Stephen King's Carrie. These are non-negotiables. And inbetween these necessary tasks, I must write and edit a video. Luckily I am equipped with great powers of focus, and the ability to just fart out words. Does the video have to be good? Well, no. But I do hope for that to happen. Mostly, though, it has to exist. This is the number one thing about it. It has to be real, just as I have to read thirty pages of Stephen King's Carrie. These are indisputable facts of life. I am powerless to alter them.

And it's also true that I have to play some sort of High School Musical DS game. Without this, I won't be informed enough to understand the world around me. That wouldn't be any good.

High School Musical: Makin' the Cut! (2007).

Please wish me luck with all of my important tasks. I will do my very best to attend to them. 

Neglected Retro Games

It's kind of insane and magical just how easy it is to play retro games. I remember my first time seeing an emulator playing one of the earlier Pokémon games on a friend's laptop in around 2008 and thinking, "hell yeah", but we've come way past that. You can play long-discontinued Java games on your computer, you can play any number of C64 games in-browser, and you can play Ring Rage and many other arcade hits in-browser too.

Mermaid Madness (1986).

Granted, these somewhat more niche formats often have awkward control issues and glitched audio and so on - they're not as beloved and supported as, say, Game Boy titles. But that's part of why it makes me so happy to see them so accessible. They're lesser-known chunks of gaming history that have plenty of their own charm.

Take Jack and the Beanstalk for example, a beautiful C64 game about climbing that stalk. I love its insane-looking screens, its joyful sun smiling vacantly from high above, and its chunky little player avatar.

Cute.

The game is a nightmare to play. You have to avoid various insects and birds as you ascend the beanstalk, and those creatures go shockingly fast. An insurmountable, horrifying challenge. I love it.

Many of this era's games become, through their unforgiving gameplay, more of a sort of surreal and bothersome interactive digital painting. You enter their world and you are unwelcome. It's unbelievably awkward and challenging to make progress, and so sometimes I start to think of this as more of a distant cultural experience than a game. I'm just here, looking on, with wide eyes and useless fingers. Help me.

Maggotmania, a game where you get insta-killed if you touch a leaf on the ground.

The world is a terrifying place, and none of us are making it out alive. 

I Hate Leggings

I have to reveal the truth, and I have to shock you all with my confession: I hate leggings.

The pose of fear.

In the 2010s, when leggings re-emerged as a trendy, soft alternative to the skinny jean, I was delighted. I had fond memories of wearing them as a child, and I was, as I still am, a major fan of all things elasticated. Sizing didn't have to matter as much, buttons and zips didn't have to be dealt with, I no longer had to suffer that thing that happens with bunched-up fabric at the crotch of many trousers, and relatively low-cut waists didn't threaten ass exposure quite as much with the steadfast body-hugging qualities of the legging waist. Many problems solved.

They are: ugly.

There were, of course, issues that took the place of all those trouser tribulations. The worst of them was the scourge of entirely see-through leggings produced by companies that I can only only conclude hate and want to humiliate woman - many of us didn't know we were showing full moon because we hadn't inspected our cheeks under full daylight while doing squats, because none of us knew we had to do stuff like that, and so the tiresome online debate leaked into our lives: are leggings pants? The answer is and always was yes, leggings were sold and used as trousers, that was the entire point, they were just also shit. The people were incensed. It was a hard time. But I think the leggings-wearers suffered more than the leggings-onlookers.

She's crazy for this.

At this point, leggings have massively replaced jeans as the go-to thing to wear in many areas. We have flared ones now (which I admit tempt me - I am remembering dragging my flared trousers through muddy puddles in 2006 or so, and I yearn for that filth), and we have the sort of fitness influencer world no-one could've predicted. Sports bras and other athleisure is everywhere, and it frightens me. Scrunch-butt leggings? No thanks, I'll just take the big cartoon suicide pill.

I will not fall for this.

This sort of overwhelming market saturation has lead to something of a sartorial fatigue in that leggings are the slobwear of choice, and so it's reached a point where just putting on some jeans can make you feel a bit put together. What was the height of casual now feels like a slight step above. I don't think I ever really used to notice if everyone was dressed just like me, but now I feel slobbish and boring in leggings. Maybe it's an age thing. If I was fifteen I would probably feel normal and cool in leggings, but I'm an adult and there's a vague sense of uncoolness that begins to pervade the doomed adult body. I am simply another bland woman in a Sainsbury's, and that's fine, but nevertheless there is something of an aspirational need to wear anything but leggings while I pick out my favourite two-pack of avocados.

Normal picture of me in my unassuming, nondescript outfit.

Mostly, though, my hatred for leggings comes directly from the feel of them. People used to say stuff like "leggings are so soft" and "my leggings are so comfortable". I remember this, and I used to feel it too. I used to feel relaxed and flexible in those things. But now I just feel vaguely constricted. I feel my temperature being trapped in the slightly too hot range, and I feel a prickling itch, always. It's severe enough that if I do wear leggings out, I'm undoubtedly ripping them off the second I get home. I can't do this anymore.

Not so with tights. I love tights. They don't make me feel itchy.

In the cemetery with tights on. Thank God.

Maybe it's just my leggings. Maybe something in their makeup is all wrong for little old me. Maybe different leggings would please and delight me. But I'm committed to my hatred at this stage. Leggings and I are over. I'll wear my single remaining pair until they spontaneously crumble into a fine dust, and then I will cheer and screech with joy forever. No more leggings. Set the legs free.

Freeing my legs in Seoul, April 2025.

The Pitt Frightens Me

Yes, I love The Pitt for its fast pace, its interconnected educational PSA structure, and its lovable goofballs, but I have found myself clutching the edge of the couch in fear and shuddering with each new episode. There is little more anxiety inducing than this stream of escalating injuries. I feel a deep fear rise from within.

When I was a kid I had a real fondness for hospitals. I once had to have grommets put in my ears to ventilate the middle ear because my hearing was a little bit off - the things that happen to the body are, sometimes, cartoonish - and I distinctly remember my excitement. The hospital had a pufferfish-themed info pack (which I think included pufferfish stickers - yay!) and I felt very taken care of and fascinated by the workings of the hospital.

Back then, hospitals seemed like magical places. This was the height of human knowledge, a locus of academic brilliance and cool machinery, and I was obsessed. The hospital is like a sort of library. Doctors and nurses were little sweeties, and all things clinical, instead of frightening me, comforted and impressed me. If anything happened that required a hospital visit, I felt relieved to be heading to and arriving at the place where you were almost certainly the safest.

I've had a few ambulance rides in my time. Once I had a random neck spasm in the bath, and two paramedics had to help me out and place me in a neck brace. The solution: a beautiful muscle relaxant that made me feel very relaxed (too relaxed) for a few days. The doctor told me: "sometimes that just happens".

I still have a great reverence for hospitals, and think they're very cool, but as an adult I steadily replaced my awe and excitement for them with straightforward discomfort and anxiety. I guess there was a sense of innocence to my love of hospitals, and now I've seen and heard too much. Instead of feeling relieved and joyful that I've made it to the best place for treatment, I've come to associate the hospital with OH GOD OH NO SOMETHING BAD IS HAPPENING. Now I gotta get outta there.

And so, when I watch The Pitt, I can't help but imagine all of those injuries and diseases happening to me. I can't help but remember that one day I categorically will die. And I think: oh. I don't want that. I actually really want to live and not be harmed.

But okay, I try to think of this sort of anxiety as a kind of test. If I watch a show like this, and I feel that white knuckle freaky feeling when something bad is happening to someone onscreen, but then after the episode is finished I can come back down to a calm baseline and accept the horrors I've seen, maybe it helps me to be better able to handle such feelings. After all, if you experience anxiety, but then you're okay, you can reinforce your ability to go through it. You have evidence that it's all gonna be okay. I'd say that sometimes I might feel a sense of heightened anxiety and worry for around ten to twenty minutes after an episode of The Pitt ends. My mind lingers on the bloody lacerations. I breathe heavily and I feel a bit shaky or tingly. But then it's over. Nothing's happening to me. And if something does happen, well, I'll go to the hospital. It's the best place to be.

Once I was in the cardiology dept. of a hospital and I heard the young doctors singing "boom, clap, the sound of my HEART, the beat goes on and on and on and on and", and I thought, God, that's beautiful. I love the hospital.

The Most Beautiful Game

A while ago I decided to play through Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (My Summer Holiday 2, or Boku's Summer Holiday 2) when I discovered that this special little game had gotten a fan translation. It's a simple, atmospheric game about being a little boy visiting his aunt and uncle for his summer break, and you spend it wandering around the serene island, catching bugs, and chatting.

It's a very relaxed game with a laid back structure which predominently expects you to explore. You can see a little bit more of the island and maybe talk to a new person each day, but time passes and soon you have to go home and have dinner. I like the way this gets at the restricted, regimented feel of being a child, even though you're allowed to run off freely each day.

One of the main things you can do in the game is collect bugs and fish, and so it's often compared to games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, but Boku no Natsuyasumi is more of a relaxed, breezy RPG in that the focus is really on your conversations. It's all about gaining a little bit of insight into those around you, and the game makes it really satisfying to explore that narrative and environmental detail for its own sake.

Catching fish and/or bugs, though, is straightforward and satisfying. It just feels good to grab 'em.

Got one!

There are plenty of charming details and funny pieces of dialogue, but it's also this unique visual aesthetic that makes it really wonderful to play. I love the lush, complicated backgrounds, brimming with light, satisfyingly cluttered. There are streams, varied houses, and lots of interesting little nooks to explore. It's a beautiful game, and you end up really feeling like you're in a real place.

I also adore the cute 3D models of the characters. They contrast so nicely with the gorgeous, naturalistic, detailed backgrounds. Boku, the player character, is so cute. Look at him.

Aww.

It's a very sweet game, and I've never played anything remotely like it before. There is a subtle complexity to it, and a sense that Boku is at the edge of understanding in many ways - he's privy to a lot of conversation that is slightly out of reach to him as a young child, a lot of adult understandings that are passed over his head, directly to the player. It creates this wonderful feeling of nostalgia, as Boku's innocence is ever-present and colours everything that we see and hear.

It's a lovely look at all the joy and sadness and strangeness and silliness of being alive.

The entire world is a puzzle with no solution. And endless insects. How true.