The Scary Game

 Last month I played an eclectic and quite frankly, intellectual sequence of games, including The Smurfs for the Nintendo 3DS. I was happy then. I was loving life. In the beautiful yet terrifying month of October, however, I have been playing one game only - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.

Cutie alert!

 
Now, as you surely know, this is a game of great honour. Everyone loves the first 3D Zelda game, with all its woodsy spirit and chunky glory. And I can see why. Traversing Hyrule is delightful. I feel like a real tiny little forest boy, excited to slam each new skeleton with my cute little sword. Pumped up to smash another pot. Life is a dream. And there are things that feel impressive about the environment - the oscillating, rapid sunsets that make you feel even smaller, the wonderful and varied characters.

Let's not talk about 'The Bachelor' at this time.

There's something vivid about this Hyrule, especially when you accidentally sleep through seven years and awaken to find that you have a new, lanky man-body, and are in the haunted ruin of a once-bustling town.

People talk about how dark Majora's Mask is, but Ocarina has its own delicious sense of death. At one point, Ganon jumps out of paintings on a glowing ghost horse to attack you. He is demonic. I love him.

A genuine weirdo.

I very much enjoy the atmosphere, and the cute and goofy and severe characters you come across (in one area there are a thousand dogs who will follow you at night), but there is also something frustrating and impenetrable about the game. Its gameplay feels, at times, like trying to get blood from a stone. Yes, there are a few reminder systems that make it impossible to get completely lost on your next big goal (thank you Navi), but it's the small steps that tend to feel puzzling.

I didn't play this game as a kid, so I can't approach it from that determined perspective. Maybe if I had, I would feel differently about the obtuse piecing together of What To Do Next, but for me, it feels like an awfully stressful game. I've played with and without a guide, and in both cases I feel a kind of constant pressure. Ganon is getting to me. Where is the next golden skulltula?

Do I really have to get inside him? Really?

The step-by-step of it all feels unintuitive and unwieldy. There are lots of unpleasant tasks to deal with, like holding Princess Ruto over your head as you run through Jabu-Jabu's belly, desperately jumping in holes.

So true.

However, the beauty and tragedy of the world, the wonderfully designed, distinct dungeons, and the lively and quirky characters please me. I like them all so much.

Do not ever ask me to shoot all those rupees for the quiver upgrade though. I can't and won't do it. 

The Things Which Are Advertised To Me On Instagram

 There is an air of death to Instagram. A stench. The thing has a sort of growing emptiness fed by years of corporate re-shuffling, the kind of algorithm-tweaking that results in me seeing more autoplaying videos of undressing nineteen-year-olds than I ever would have wanted (desired number: zero), and the lingering feeling that you are walking at medium speed down an endless white corridor, getting further and further away from anyone you might be pleased to see.

Nevertheless, it's still a place full of fun, artsy, creative people, and a place where, more than anything, I will see interesting sketches and speedpaints, junk journal madness, and flatlays of bookish, lace-laden outfits. It's a place bursting with youthful, jubilant woman with Sanrio obsessions, and so I must, by law, remain there with them.

Because of this unstoppable demographic of sweet and strange women with an eye for lace trim and shiny silver hardware (in the handbag sense, not the computer sense), and because Instagram is one of the few platforms on which I am still forced to see ADVERTISEMENTS (Tumblr long ago gifted me their ad-free subscription because of my beauty and celebrity - thank you Tumblr), I am served a lot of promotional material on there for stuff I actually quite like. As an exercise in extreme and highly commendable self-control, I shall review these for you now instead of buying them.

 

ELFSACK

Now, these ads tend to be for clothes or bags, more often than not, and my favourites are always the small and sort of unique brands. Little companies with odd names that fit a kind of dreamy fantasy aesthetic. Like ELFSACK (always in all caps). They have a cool, distorted logo. They have some decidedly mori girl items (yes!!! Muddy greens! Geography teacher cardigans!). Their name is ELFSACK (a sack carried by an elf?)

I like their combo of decidedly weird, more flashy items (see: ultra-long Scrooge McDuck skirt), and their softer, more understated autumnal wear.

The beret they put this model in says it all. A few small steps away from Señorita Awesome, but with one boot firmly planted in the centre of a fairy ring.

 

PUPARI

This is a really cute one. Maybe the cutest thing I've ever seen an advertisement for. They really have me pinned down with this. A very pretty and cute jewellery company that make these fun, sweet little animals and body parts.

My favourite item of theirs is probably this little bunny with a pink pearl dangling from it, but I also love the ears and noses they have available. I especially love that the "nose ring" has its own nose ring. Wonderful. 

ONITSUKA TIGER

Finally, Onitsuka Tiger - the cool trainer brand.

While I'm not a huge fan of these boxing shoes (they're just too long for me), I think their classic tennis shoes are pretty cute. I like them in this green and cream colourway. I also enjoy the kinda strange-looking ballet flats. However, I have promised myself I will only wear slip-on shoes from now on. Laces are in my past. Slip-on or nothing.

This is a promise to my feet.

Skull & Serpent

 When I visit museums, I'm always excited to see groups of people sketching the artefacts. I always really want to join them, and then destroy them by doing the best and most crazed drawing. This is a competition, I think, and I could win. But usually, I'm with someone who needs to go fast (understandable - life is short, and our legs hurt quickly), and I probably don't have a big, beautiful, chunky sketchbook on hand either.

Fortunately, we are blessed with online catalogues of museum pieces that are both fascinating to look at, and enticing to draw.

One such wonder is the V&A's collections, in which I found an intriguing ivory figure of a child stepping on a skull and a snake. A tiny little goth.

Here he is.

The website speculates that this is "probably" a depiction of the Christ child - overcoming death (skull) and sin (snake). Other details are similarly murky. It was made in "France or possibly the Netherlands" somewhere in the estimated forty years between 1780 and 1820. This little boy is an enigma, and I really like him. 

He was the clear first choice for a sketch, and I love his serene little face, sort-of statesman-like, and the cartoonish, medieval look of that weird snake. Cute.

The Games I Played in September

 Ok, it's the last day of September. Let's do a gaming audit.

Mr Bean and my own character, 'Simple Dog', just got married in Tomodachi Life.

 
Recently, I watched a video by HamsterButtocks (powerful username), in which she 'replaced doomscrolling' with playing games on her 3DS. It's a pretty long video, and in it, she details a week of spending all of her downtime gaming.

Something about this video really struck me, and so I was inspired to carve out some time to spend playing games every day, and in particular to do it on my 3DS - partly to enjoy an end-of-the-month summary of my activities in the wonderful, holy Activity Log.

I also played Birth by Sleep pretty extensively on my PS Vita, however, so we'll start with that.

The dwarves are about to encounter a spiky-haired twelve-year-old.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is a strange game. You play it three times, as three different characters whose stories intersect. I can't comment on that too much yet, as I've only just finished the first playthrough as Dull Guy Terra, but I generally enjoy the gimmicky, inventive ideas like this that the series is so fond of. I liked the drops in Dream Drop Distance, after all. And after playing the first few minutes of the Ventus playthrough, where he meets the dwarves from Snow White and has to chase them down and attack them (they deserve this), I believe that I am also a fan of this gameplay mode.

Here are the gorgeous Terra playthrough stats:

Fascinating.

Now, let's move on to the 3DS. 

There were three games that I spent most of my time on here. Tetris (classic good stuff), Hyrule Warriors Legends (seems... ok), and The Smurfs.

Almost seven hours of gaming... she's crazy!

 
Yes, I spent three hours and twenty-one minutes playing the 3DS Smurfs game from 2015, and it was, in fact, my favourite one.

 
It's a simple game where you re-build the Smurfs' village via a series of mini games, and I got pretty into it. Those mini games were compelling despite their extreme simplicity, and when I rolled credits I was pretty satisfied. It's literally fun. You don't get it. You're not brave enough to get it.

The killer has arrived.

 
Hyrule Warriors Legends felt a bit dull, mostly on account of the extremely lengthy missions, but not helped by the game causing a major crash on my 3DS. I've heard that Hyrule Warriors is better on other systems, so that might be the best plan for any future forays into this one, but I am curious: what can I feed these pet fairies? I need to know.

#MyFairy

 
Finally, I did try 'Puppies World 3D' on the 3DS, where you can adopt a cute toy poodle, but truly all I did was name this poodle 'Gromp' and then close the game. So the Puppies World remains, as of now, a relative mystery to me.

Withering

 A few days ago I went to the Marmottan museum and saw, nestled in a hollow slightly away from all of the Monets, this little room of sunflowers by Françoise Pétrovitch. Titled Soleil, they appear to show a cycle of decay, or rather, the unorganised stages of a sunflower on its way to death, and I like how bright and alive the perfect, wide, healthy ones are - almost a marvel among the crunched and drooping flowers.

Me and them.

Sunflowers have taken on a great symbolism in my family lately. They were a particular favourite of my grandma (she used a sunflower photo as her avatar on WhatsApp, so if you texted her you would be texting the sunflower), and so every so often one of us will send a picture of some sunflower or other, with the understanding: we're thinking of Norma.

And it is, it cannot be denied, a good flower. The ultimate big, juicy, tall one, and such a reminder of childhood (growing a sunflower is still, I think, a common kids' first gardening project). We named it after the sun itself! What a thing!

The healthy sunflower.

The sick ladies.

 What I love about these paintings most is that intense purple disc of florets that brings an almost otherworldy richness to the flower. It's like something you'd see when crossing into an afterlife. I think it's the technique that really brings it this quality, almost pearlescent in that stark difference made by pooling water left to sit on the paper. This beautiful pooling is present in lots of Pétrovitch's other work, and it adds such a big, ethereal texture to every piece it touches.

Other work from Pétrovitch's website.

 

Love that.

 

 Seeing the sunflowers together, I'm struck by the aesthetic gorgeousness of the emblems of vibrant, peak, bouyant life, and the markers of death alike. Some of these fuckers look mouldy. The colour leaches from them, leaving a sallow ghost. And she's gorgeous too, in her decrepitude.

Look at that nasty one. Mmm.

Of course, life and death is hardly a unique theme, and I even feel dull describing it here, but nevertheless the crunch of it, that transient drooping, remains touching. The texture of it all. The ugly mess. It's all clumped together into a perfect, grainy collection.

I love that these are on paper. I love the torn edges. Live forever, sunflowers. Die forever too.

Brown Paper Scrapbook Bonanza

 Today's exciting blog post is simply a bunch of pages from my journal. This one is a square format scrapbook with brown paper, and I love working on the darker base colour. It really makes whites pop. It's also the chunkiest journal I have, so there's something deliciously childlike about opening it up, scribbling on that lovely thick and grainy texture. Hell yes. A good mix of stuff here, it lends itself so nicely to mixed media.

Plus, my friend Jen gave me some stickers of her face at her birthday party a few years ago, so I had to make them their own page. A beautiful memory. Thank you Jen.