Screenshots from my Phone

A text exchange I had in August of last year.

A few days ago I saw this Instagram reel from bycrafticharli about her "screenshot journal". It's a journal... full of screenshots she's taken. Wow, I thought. Impeccable idea.

There's something deeply enticing about a physical journal filled with screenshots, flapping in the breeze as all screenshots should. I myself am guilty of taking a lot of screenshots of things that interest me, stuff to come back to later, and this is tragically responsible for a chunky percentage of my phone's storage. Alas, I am a mere mortal, and I too have screenshot disease.

Now, I'm not sure if the beautiful real-life screenshot journal is something I can reasonably commit to doing, mostly because the level of printing involved would be a bit of a nightmare in terms of ink use (which we must always diligently avoid), and the time costs involved in printing and sticking and annotating would also be, I think, a pain. I just don't have the TIME for all that. I need to play three hours straight of Donkey Kong Bananza, eat a bowl of pasta, and then crack open Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, after all. And that's before I dare to do any 'work'. 

What I can do right now, though, is share some of my screenshots directly with you, my loving blog audience. Behold, my curious interests:

#1: Senseless Optimism & Nuns of the Tundra

I try not to spend too much time on TikTok because it really can become endlessly addictive way too easily, but what I like about the platform is its ability to bring me perfect music from various small artists. 

Some favourites among my TikTok finds are MARiMARi, vi0let, Calvero, and Hemlocke Springs, but here are two I still need to seriously check out: Senseless Optimism, a wonderfully frenetic indie rock artist who makes these awesomely complex tracks and videos where... there are three of her. And then there's Nuns of the Tundra, a crunchy rock band in the vein of Queens of the Stone Age.

#2: I smoked every Chinese cigarette so you don't have to (DO NOT DO IT)

This is a video by Bodega Kat that showed up in my recommendations. It horrified me, yet it made me laugh, so I screenshotted it.

#3: Rumble Roses

PlayStation Park is one of a small selection of Tumblr accounts I follow who post gifs of various PlayStation games, and sometimes I'll be intrigued by a game and screenshot a post. This was one such incident, a gif from Rumble Roses, which is, as it turns out, a PlayStation 2 game centred on women's wrestling. It includes a mud wrestling mode, which seemed unique and interesting to me.

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And that's all for now, although as I'm sure you can imagine, there are many more screenshots lurking. This is merely a smattering. 

Wikigatcha is Evil

I have made a terrible mistake. I've discovered Wikigacha.

Wikigacha is a browser game where you can endlessly open trading card booster packs. The cards you find within are random Wikipedia articles, which you can then battle against random opponents, that is, random other random Wikipedia articles (sorry for that unpleasant syntax).

Japanese superstitions are no match for Ultraman Retsuden.

One problem with this game is that the text on the cards is miniscule. Yet my powerful mind directs me to read them anyway, as soon as it detects words. This is troubling. I can feel my eyes being strained within milliseconds. This cannot be good.

What is this, a card for ants? 

The other problem is that, seriously, the booster packs don't run out. There's an ostensible wait after you open ten packs, but you can just watch an ad and almost instantly conjure a new pack. If you have an adblocker installed, you just click a button to do the same thing anyway, and away you go. This both immediately diminishes some of the built-in fun of collecting, and thrusts you into a horrible addiction immediately. It's hard to stop clicking. We have reached another painful, mind-destroying Cookie Clicker style situation. And I am afraid.

Some of my first cards include a list of PlayStation 3 models, the song 'Feel Special' by Twice, and acclaimed documentary Grey Gardens. 

Wikigacha also has achievements, for things like diligently opening ten booster packs, and reaching large number milestones for cards collected. I suppose I will have to get them all.

Well, that's it for me. I have no choice but to keep pulling cards. 

Photographic Flipnotes

Since I've been doing a lot of noodling around on the 3DS lately, I of course could not neglect its Flipnote title, Flipnote Studio 3D. This is the 3DS's number one art tool that allows you to make animations. It has a very particular style to it - you can clock a Flipnote from ten miles away - and it is quite sophisticated.

One of its interesting features is that you can take a photo in it, which will be translated into this pretty dithered style. I've seen this used to great effect for backgrounds of drawings, but here I thought, let's just go back to the basics and make a photographic animation. The number one thing to do when you are twelve.

There is an ultimate simplicity to this that feels so right. I don't even need to draw anything. I can just move my 3DS and make stop motion. Classic good fun. Why aren't we all doing this every day?

Also, I find myself impressed with small file sizes more and more these days. Something has taken hold of me and I find myself thinking things like "wow, only 33kb!" - and that, dear reader, is the size of the Super Mario gif at the top of this post. Is that not impressive? Does that not make you smile proudly? 

Thirty-three kilobytes, darling. That's all he is. 

Weird 3DS Double Exposures

In my experimentation with the 3DS camera, I discovered 3dswigglegram.com, a website which allows you to convert MPO files (the file type the 3DS uses for its 3D photos) to animated gifs.

This is the resulting wigglegram for this image, correctly aligned and dutifully wiggling.

It does this in a beautifully elegant way in-browser, by showing you each of the two separate images stored in the file, and two sliders you can use to align them. This creates animations which can be adjusted depending on where you want the focal point of your image to be, and in the process you get to see these oddly pretty misaligned negative images.

Sometimes these warped and dreamy overlaid images look cooler than the animation or photo itself, and it's really fun to play around with, to shift those sliders around. I love the extremely saturated colours and the stark black in all of them.

They create this wonderful alien world, and I love how two versions of the same image combined like this conjures a sense of wrongness. It's such good shorthand for unease or altered consciousness. Looking at these, I just think: Yeah. That's what it's like, baby. 

They're perfectly crunchy and unpleasant. I'm vaguely reminded of David Lynch's Dune and its gloopy special effects. 

I love them. 

Me & My Mario

Here he is. My dear Mario. I've had him for about nine months now (he is so young), and I simply adore him. You can probably understand why by looking at him up close. His stitching is divine. His material is soft. He's shaped just right.

I think my favourite element of his construction is the little red loop he has on the back of his head. This means he can attach easily to a bag to become a comically large bag charm (this honestly makes me feel powerful).

You can also simply hang him up anywhere you like. If he's naughty, he'll go up on the wall until he behaves better. Usually though, I don't feel the need to do this. It's much more common that I have Mario sitting (or lying down) next to me. He might rest on a pillow while I write, or nestle with me before bed.

He's just my sweet little guy. 

I Have Become Enlightened

Have you ever perused YouTube late at night, at say, two in the morning, and suddenly located a new favourite YouTuber? Someone who makes some oddly perfect video, brought to you as an angel might in a dream? Well, this happened to me the other night, when I glimpsed this video glistening expectantly in the sidebar:

Hmm. An unassuming bloke playing three hundred dusty PC games from one mega-CD? And it's an hour long? Sign me up. Take me away. I am ready.

This is 'DOS Storm', a channel going over DOS games. You know, like Minesweeper. Classic. 

There's a charm and ease to this guy which is brought out really well in this chunky, 300-game video. But the way he goes over miscellaneous, varied DOS game demos in minute detail really speaks to me. This sort of excavation is thrilling. I love the strange and often dated creative choices so many of these games make.

What is this? It's Penny's Arcade (1996).

I get the sense, watching this video, that I could watch it for hours. That I could sit back and watch this stretching on for eternity, until I'd learned every last tiny detail of every DOS game ever made. And then maybe it'd start over, spool out forever, a personal heaven. 

Many of the games he showcases are simplistic in this very particular way, and there's an immense joy to be had in these, but others strike me as wonderfully designed, eclectic, unique gems. Look at this thing, for example:

I love that.

Really interesting and good video. It's nice to be reminded of the sheer endless expressive possibilities that exist. If there's a way to invent some nonsense, people will do it. 

Reviewing J2ME Games: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a side-scrolling shooter made by Smallfry in 2007. It's a bullet hell situation, where you must take out attackers as the screen relentlessly pushes you rightwards. Simple, beautiful, try not to die.

There are certain stylish elements to this game. The title screen is this hyperlink blue with a simple, beautiful logo, which appears with a pretty acoustic guitar flourish, and as you play you hear frightening, discordant piano, which beautifully escalates when you get a pick-up into a briefly slightly more hopeful tune.

We see a little text introduction to the game, some flavour text about the Nautilus, and then we're thrust into the main screen: a lush underwater world with shadowy sharks lurking in the background.

Many things will shoot balls of energy at you. The ocean is thick with enemies. You simply have to avoid and destroy as many of them as possible until you succumb to the war of the sea, and enter your delicious high score.

It took me three tries to beat the high score. Now it's just a game against myself. Behold, my personal best. I am the 20,000 Leagues champion. And I love it.