Late Night Wigglers

I always think the number one good thing to do for artistic joy is to find a way to lose your inhibitions, to not be precious with your decisions. And it's tough because it inevitably creeps back up, that guarded need to do things right, to make the mark you see in your beautiful, perfect mind. But I've always surprised myself in the best ways when I let loose and draw foolishly and hurriedly. I rarely do warm-ups, but they're always good.

So here are some gorgeous Wigglypaint drawings I made last night. It was just before bed, but I wanted to make a little drawing. I needed to. So I made this:

And for some reason, I haven't really tried colouring a flat background like this in Wigglypaint before. It looks elevated and alive. This is a beautiful, bright night. And the bunnies dance. Wow. 

I played with the shapes a little bit more than usual too. Like for this simple dog, I decided to use the thicker, blobbier pen. It sort of gives the dog a sense of calm simplicity. It feels somehow more primordial to see LARGER pulsing blobs. I can feel what it must've been like to be the hottest amoeba in the swamp. Mmm.

Another thing I really love is drawing slightly more realistic facial expressions. I have, truthfully, taken a lot of repulsive pictures of myself to aid in this practice. And that's just an extra nugget of fun you get with reference photos that you take yourself - enjoying the really ugly ones. I will not be showing you any today, but perhaps another time. 

And here is my simple favourite of the night, the dog leaving behind its pristine poo. Lovely. 

5 Crazy Movies

Here are some movies I've watched in the past few months, and some thoughts about them. This is mostly a way of clearing up a large folder of screenshots I've accumulated, because for a while I got really into taking screenshots as I watched (all for the blog), and then I didn't end up writing about every film because some of them were less interesting in the moment or whatever. Please enjoy my personal screenshots. They were taken with love.

1. The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

This is, as should be obvious, a joyous watch. Miss Piggy is a wonderful shy freak, inexplicably pretending to be a famous woman, until Kermie figures out the truth. The thing about The Muppets is that the jokes are constant and good. The effective humour really propels us through the narrative, and there's so much texture. Peter Falk is here. We're into gangster and newspaper stuff, as was the hot trend in 1981, and it's great. Just delicious.

 ★★★★☆

2. Marty Supreme (2025)

There's a real sizzling feel to this. Timothée Chalamet's Marty is an insane schemer, a ball of energy and rage who nevertheless maintains a certain winsome charm. He's a little weirdo and I hate him. But I love to see both the awful predicaments he finds himself in and the dizzying highs he achieves. What the fuck.

★★★★★ 

3. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

This is a weird movie that annoyed me, but it does reach a point at which it becomes sort of intriguing. At first, and really for quite a long time, the movie lingers on Marilyn Monroe's excruciatingly ditzy protagonist. We see her balk at the idea of romance with the stuffy royal bloke she's sent off to, but after a few shots she falls blissfully in love with him. So far, so bland, but once we move past this and into the murky, daytime cartoon politics of the thing, it becomes a sort of crunchy, weird little movie. Marilyn becomes a political actor and it all feels oddly absent. Weird movie. 

★☆☆☆☆ 

4. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

This is a reverent movie about the noble flighty spirit of men at arms. A new woman falls in love with an absent, traumatised pilot and essentially has to come to terms with the fact that he will not commit to her or like, express things to her. It's very of it's time in the worst way, illustrated best by the scene in which Cary Grant dumps water over his ex-gf to extinguish her emotion and put her back in her place as a stoic woman stalwartly deferring to a stifling masculine atmosphere of repression. Truly miserable.

★☆☆☆☆ 

5. Chutney Popcorn (1999)

I watched this because I wanted to know more about the director of Freakier Friday - Nisha Ganatra - and this was her directorial debut. The plot here is that a lesbian decides to act as surrogate for her sister and her husband, but then their plans change. I thought the movie was sort of tonally weird, a bit trance like. The comedic elements weren't very strong, but neither were the dramatic ones, so I was left feeling kind of miffed. I enjoyed the little group of lesbians always hanging out and doing henna on each other, but I really felt that the emotional severity this film seemed to want was lacking. 

★★☆☆☆

Reviewing J2ME Games: 007

For a while I've been interested in J2ME games and their preservation in a world that has moved far away from the feature phones they were designed for. Their emulation is particularly interesting to me because it feels broken and weird in the way that a lot of older computer emulation feels. The graphics are often glitchy, the hardware you're using means that "button" interactions can work strangely and have unexpected issues. Everything feels wrong without that beautiful, physical numpad we've long since discarded.

People, broadly, don't care about these games. Where the early era of iPhone games has a certain nostalgic aesthetic for some, these games have been largely cast into the dungeon of disrespect. It's mostly because they're bad games. Many of them have clunky controls, ugly visuals, and the sort of barebones gameplay that wouldn't intrigue an amoeba, let alone a human child. But this, of course, is part of their legacy, and sometimes - just sometimes - there's a hidden gem waiting to be found.

Now, I'm quite into stats and logs and things - Last.fm scrobbles, Letterboxd reviews, and the gamer records of Backloggd - but Java games are not included in the database Backloggd uses (the Internet Game Database, or IGDB), so Java games are ghosts floating over the great expanse of certified legit games. That means I can't review them on there. They simply don't exist in the system.

Here, though, I am allowed to write about these games, and so here is game number one for you: 007.

See?

Something that happens often in Java game emulation is this thing where the screen displays most of the game in the corner. It's because they're just little baby games. They need to sit in the corner. 007's text is in Chinese, so I can't really access the plot here, but you're a guy with a gun and you have to shoot other guys with guns. Cool.

This is fine, it's a simple platformer, but your movement keys are also the keys that change the direction of fire, so it's easy to mean to move your gun so that it hits a guy to the top right, but actually just jump over to him and die.

The music is relentless and upbeat. It doesn't match the game, but it does create a certain madness in the player. When you die, three glitched versions of your body may appear. 

Frightening.

It's a tough game and not much of a fun one to continue. You really feel like you've seen it all in the first five seconds. There's more guys to kill, but I don't think I want to. The most interesting part of this game is its use of Leon and Claire from Resident Evil 2 on its title screen.

Oh is that Leon? Is it Leon shooting these guys? Wonderful.

First Impressions of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

I heard on the wind, a whisper. It said, "Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream demo on Nintendo eShop now!" I knew what I had to do. I had to download this demo onto my own Nintendo Switch and make myself, my mii, ready for her island.

The demo feels, as you'd expect, remarkably like the old Tomodachi Life on the 3DS. The same charming sounds and expressions of pure madness are here, filtered through these beautiful, smooth new graphics and a slick little island that we now must fill with little people. It's lovely.

One thing I noticed immediately is that, of course, it's not as into its touch screen. On the 3DS, there was a lot of emphasis on picking miis up and shaking them about and such. Prodding them. It was a wonderfully tactile experience, and they've translated it here into more of a computer interface thing - you interact with the miis via cursor, rather than directly as the stylus allowed. This feels a little bit odd because I'm so familiar with that earlier control scheme. I want to tap on that screen and feel that keen sense of direct interaction, but it's understandably pulled back for the Switch.

Still, the controls feel buttery smooth, and the overall experience reminds me of the pleasure of booting up Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the first time. Nintendo have headed towards a meticulously crafted, satisfying rounding off of every mechanic and visual. It looks and feels good as hell.

What I don't love is the level of tutorialising that bombards you. I can't remember how much the previous game badgered you with tuturial info at the start, but regardless, it feels like a bit of an overstep. This is true of a lot of Nintendo games, and I just wish they would focus more on communicating game mechanics and controls in more intuitive ways, because even with a short demo, I just wanna get right into the game. The entire demo spends its time throwing explanations at you. It's not the most fun way to explore a new game.

Living the Dream follows the same general structure as its predecessor - you add miis to your island, you give them food and stuff, and that's more or less the deal. You're free to dress them up and introduce them. I made a version of Peter Griffin for my island, and he seems happy.

Once you've introduced three miis to the island, the demo pretty much ends there, and you can no longer really talk to them. They'll just say stuff about the FULL GAME to taunt you, and their happiness levels can't grow. While I suppose the slice of life nature of this game meant that it made sense to cut you off in this way so quickly, I do wish they'd left it a little bit more playable at the end point. For completing the demo, you get a hamster outfit to transfer to the full game, which is iconic and good, but it would have been nice to be able to play around with my three miis a little bit more.

I suppose I can buy them different outfits, but I can't speak to them unless I wanna hear "HEY BUYING THIS GAME IS REALLY COOL BTW YOU CAN DO ALL SORTS OF STUFF IN THE REAL GAME". Okay. My miis are salespeople for this thing. But I just don't think Peter Griffin would say that.

Will I be getting the full game? Almost certainly. Peter needs my help. 

Blur

That beautiful late afternoon time when the sun is dipping down and everything is sort of calm and a little bit dim - that's such a perfect, peaceful time. It's still light but the sky pales against streetlights and lit signs. The night life takes a tentative step into view, and maybe you're sleepy by now. Maybe the day's work is mostly done.

There's a sense of adventure to this transition, maybe it's because it's the ideal beginning to a night out somewhere. Especially on a hot summer day, like Friday the 28th of June, 2024. The day of an impeccable soufflé.

My soufflé.

I'm always struck by the ambience of the cars and streetlights as night comes. So many details on every street, but that light change is often the thing that makes me notice them. Everything feels different in the shadows, and in the rich, golden light of a setting sun.

I used to love taking this particular sort of blurry photo. I would sit at the front on the top deck of a double decker bus and take pictures as we drove along the street, getting all these streaks of patterned light, moving away from us too quickly. There seemed something strikingly beautiful about it, like that sense of movement, impossible to stop, was a better representation of the moment in time than any static shot could be. The streaking light conveys the time through that absence of stillness.

There's something magical in that.

Battle Chess

In 1988, Interplay made a game called Battle Chess. It released on thousands of different types of computers and was all about being able to watch your chess pieces walk on over to their places on the board and beat each other to death. Good stuff.

In 1990, it was ported to the NES, and while the DOS version you can play here has some nice, shiny armour and a wonderfully unpleasant creaking sound as each piece moves, the NES version has these wonderfully expressive, slightly cuter sprites that are full of character.

Each piece walks slowly across the board when you select a move, and when a piece takes another, we fade to a battle screen and watch the kill. It's on this screen that I learned the king uses a gun. He just blasts any enemy he comes across with it. Nice.

An exemplary piece of design is the rook, which splits itself into two weird, blocky legs in order to stomp itself into position. That's no tower, that's a creature! And I love that thing very much.

Because each piece has to walk over to its new position every turn, the experience of playing chess this way is very slow. Your move can't be quick, because the people you're using as pieces have to slowly make their way to their square. It feels quickly agonising, but then, I have never been a thoughtful chess player. Perhaps the lengthy animation offers the perfect moment for reflection.

Or perhaps not. 

The Addam's Family on the NES

While I have a lot of love for the blocky charm and limited colour palettes of earlier games and computer consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64, playing a NES game directly after being immersed in that world feels like an insanely beautiful experience.

Pugsley alert!

I've been playing The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, a NES game released in 1992, and in this we can see a real perfection of pixel art detail. The inclusion of sprite outlines alone does so much heavy lifting in terms of creating a really detailed look that those earlier eras lacked. Pugsley is real in this game. He is a real man. I can tell because of his outline.

There was a more colourful, detailed, and more fun SNES version of the game released with the NES and Game Boy versions, but I love the high-contrast look of the NES game. Pugsley is often set against pitch black backgrounds that really enhance the atmosphere. There's also a gorgeous, sinister tree to be seen.

I love him.

As far as the gameplay goes, Pugsley sadly has only two hearts. He can get hit precisely twice, and the second time: he's dead. It's really sad, and makes the game instantly excruciating. In the SNES game, you have higher base health, and arenas are also designed more intuitively. In this version, you're scrambling around, lost in the dark, knowing you're most definitely about to die. You might imagine that would create a nice frightening Addams Family atmosphere, but it doesn't. It's just very tiring.

Weird green thing alert!

Nevertheless, the game is, in its own way, quite beautiful. Pugsley's face when he dies is this horrible, warped expression. His mouth and eyes become huge empty holes. It's amazing. 

In the SNES version of the game, Pugsley employs a Dennis the Menace style grin, because he knows he can get what he wants - cash money - but in the NES game, Pugsley is innocently joyful as he traverses the stark blackness around him. The two games convey two remarkably unconnected Pugsleys. And I have to admit, I prefer the hapless, easily killed, certifiably pink Pugsley.

He's nasty.

And so, perhaps, does his mother.