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. 

Fingernails: A Failed Black Mirror Movie

I gave myself a loose, enticing mission earlier this year: to watch many of the films of Jessie Buckley, now the newest Best Actress winner at the Academy Awards for her role in a film I didn't like. My Hamnet hate, however, must be saved for another post, because this one is about sci-fi stinker Fingernails (2023).

She wears some very good jumpers.

In this film, she is Anna, a woman with a striking art school haircut who works at the fingernail-plucking office, and whose fingernail tests kind of fuck up her life. You see, in this world, you can perform a simple compatability test on the fingernails of two people (which they have to have ripped out - don't worry, this is apparently very easy to do with pliers!) which will determine whether they have "true love".

Now, you're probably asking "what the hell does that mean?" And the thing is, I don't know. The movie obfuscates much of its central premise in a way that utterly destroys all narrative tension, and leaves you in the viewer's swamp, the place where you go when the internal logic of a movie is unconnected nonsense. I think the love test and its result are meant to act as an allegory for the concept of certainty itself - to get at the very boring and predictable idea that you can choose to go by the result or not, that there can be no real guarantees in love - but the actual reality of the idea of the love test in the world it inhabits is logically inconsistent at best and absolutely meaningless at worst.

Jessie Buckley's Anna has a nice boyfriend, played by Jeremy Allen White in one of those cool 1970s shearling jackets, and he is an iconically gentle, beautifully absent man. He has the glossy eyes of a doll, and the kind of calm acceptance of a lone sheep atop a hill. I love him. And I love them together. They both have an odd energy that seems to complement the other. But alas, despite their POSITIVE TRUE LOVE TEST, established at the beginning of the movie, Anna meets and becomes obsessed with a different, worse guy at work.

She wants to watch Marty Supreme so bad.

Here it becomes an excruciating romcom with an irritating gimmick. Anna and her new love interest work on basically preparing fun dates for couples who are about to take the love test. The idea is that they are doing vague scientific experiments to figure out how they can encourage positive tests, but it's all really dull, obvious stuff like singing love songs to each other, or going on thrill rides together. Y'know, to bond. If all of this random crap can so influence the love test into saying two people are in love, then how is the test reliable? And yes, they do say explicitly that the test lets you know "if you're in love", which is weird, because we can already know that about ourselves and pretty easily find it out about other people. Why would I pull my fingernail out to know something my mind can tell me?

More impeccable knitwear.

The new guy is, tragically, not a remotely interesting character to watch. We see domestic scenes with Anna and her Jeremy Allen White and they have this wonderful, almost ethereal connection. We watch Anna with this new guy and they feel empty. The movie is telling me this is passion, this is romance, and all I can think is: this is boring. Maybe this could work if her pursuit of this man was framed as doomed and sinister, that the love test was ultimately correct in some absolute way after all, but ultimately the conclusion is much more straightforward: did you know, you can just ignore the test that everyone in the world is obsessed with? Wow!

Jeremy Allen White is happy to do the test again, to rip out another fingernail, to soothe Anna after she tests her nail against her coworker's on a whim. Anna rips out many of her fingernails in distress, because this movie wants us to think as much as possible about fingernails getting ripped out. And again, why they are doing this, I don't know. Jeremy Allen White and Anna love each other, as confirmed by their brand new nails test. The other guy loves her, but she doesn't love him, or something. And so, she abandons her dog-like Calvin Klein underwear model for the dweeb she doesn't love, and she says, "I don't care about the nail test". So what was the fingernail test testing? What does love mean if you can just choose the other guy anyway because you, I guess, love him? It just doesn't add up.

Jessie Buckley plays Anna with a beautiful latent madness, but the movie itself crumbles completely under the weight of its own ill-thought-out concept. I reject this and substitute it for my own perfect ending: Anna and Jeremy Allen White stay together. They just chill on the couch.

One ripped-out fingernail out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆

  

Cool Basquiat Paintings

Jean-Michel Basquiat has long been a favourite artist of mine. I love his use of colour, and his beautifully expressive, chunky figures. There's so many very satisfying shapes in his work.

On the 21st of September 2022, I went to see a Basquiat exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna, and I saw some stuff I loved.

One thing I love about Basquiat is his frank and silly depictions of human anatomy and sexuality. Here's a perfect man with a perfect cartoon penis. He looks a bit sad, but also has a halo above him, just like most men. He's perfect. And again, it's those wonderful rough shapes that make up an eclectic, textured background that make the composition so satisfying.

This is Pater (1982). The museum description reads:

Pater is the Latin word for father. Basquiat presents a generalized archetypal father image. This father can be a hero and role model, but also has an air of severity and authority about him. In this context, it would seem likely that Basquiat processes in this painting the complex relationship he had with his own father, whose home and custody he broke away from already at a young age. Like his portraits of his black heroes, the protagonist in Pater is both victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed, winner and loser. This polarity is not least expressed through the scribbly halo over the head and the cartoonishly overdrawn male genitals.  

The genitals in question.

Basquiat often conveys really great expressions. Look at this guy:

He's mad, but sort of in the way that an enemy in Spyro the Dragon is mad. There's such a great cartoon abstraction here that kind of works to emphasise and almost mock the emotional expression within. Looking at the sword and the weird hairy feet, I'm reminded of drawings made in the margins of school books. There's something pure about it. 

The bloke who wants to stab Spyro with his sword.

Finally, I really liked this drawing of his girlfriend and her big shoes:

A perfect image. 

I Must Keep Posting

It's been almost three months of daily blogging here, and I've only now hit a bit of a struggle point, just because things got a bit busy this month - I had to travel, which took some time away from me (but did allow me to watch Zootopia 2 - it was okay), and I've gotten behind on some other tasks. Nevertheless, I continue to blog. I will not be stopped. I will simply write something more inane if I must.

And the thing is, with the pressure of increased time constraints, or lessened attention that I can give to my gorgeous blog, it still feels relaxed. I'm used to a certain amount of eyes on my posts elsewhere, so this blog retains that beautiful small, isolated feeling even if it gets an increase in readership, and I feel monumentally relaxed. You know, I can make five thousand posts about my Pluribus grievances and basically no-one's going to unleash their rage in the comments. Partly because (I assume!) the readers of this blog are here because they already like me. This is not a place that invites and entices the unfamiliar - you basically have to be lead here, Pied Piper style.

They should add a riddle mechanic for accessing blogs, just to make it a really secretive thing. Only those who are prepared to venture within the DIGITAL LABYRINTH may enter. Wow. Perhaps we (those of us who are Blogger enthusiasts) would enjoy that even more.

Beautiful photo from my cousin.

It's nice to deal with the problem of time getting away from you in this super freeform way. Because usually, I try to approach my blog posts here with a sort-of magazine-y, or YouTube-light sensibility. What will be an interesting title or topic? What can I talk about that has an intriguing hook? But then, I can always fall back on the more diaristic ideas, or just post some drawings and talk about them. And it feels nice to drop back onto that kind of post, like it's a big cushion waiting for me.

This blog has the endless appeal of coming up with topics of interest, as YouTube does, but without the same importance looming over those choices. Here, I am totally free. And so, catching up with posts that I need to write feels freeing. The fact that Blogger is not popular, relatively speaking, is its own wonderful gift. There is a unique sense of connection in the small and intimate. And I guess that's one reason I consider it imperative to keep posting every day.

Another powerful drawing of a hand.

I could, and maybe will, at some point drop down to a less frequent posting schedule - a few times a week maybe, who knows - but for now, I remain committed. I must keep posting.

Hands

Hands are the enemy of all artists. This is a known fact, and a terrible truth that I tend to ignore, because hands can be circles or blobs of any kind, in many cases. The suggestion of a hand, for me, is usually enough.

But still, I feel that crunch within me, that sense that really, it's all for nothing if I can't master the hand. I need, then, to practice drawing hands. I need to become a hand understander. I must do this.

So today I made a few hand sketches, looking at my own dear hands, and I willed myself to BE the hand. I can do this. I am the hand.

They are oddly complicated structures - they need to be just right, otherwise they turn into a repulsive mass (and we have all witnessed the tragic failure of AI image generation software in its attempts to craft human hands - very sad stuff).

But you know what, these are pretty good. I'm on my way to hand enlightenment. And I'm not showing you the hands I destroyed along the way. 

The Allure of Cambridge University Press

I went to the Cambridge University Press Bookshop recently, and it struck me as very special. Perusing the shop, I felt comforted by the shelves of very dull and corporate-looking book series. Many of them scream educational in a really satisfying way.

In particular, I loved this shelf of Canto Classics, these wonderfully bare designs accompanying a range of fascinating topics published by Cambridge University Press. According to the university website, this imprint aims to collate "the most successful titles published by Cambridge over the past half-century and more" and looking at these books, you get a real sense of the breadth of study on display.

It includes books like C.S. Lewis' 'The Discarded Image' - an exploration of medieval and rennaissance literature -, and Hobspawn and Ranger's 'The Invention of Tradition' - an examination of how startlingly recent many things that we consider ancient traditions are. These are immediately dazzling, beefy topics that I'd love to know more about.

The books, despite their decidedly school textbook appearance, are enticing. The sheer intrigue of their ideas is utterly compelling. And so, I like the way they look - the way they communicate a certain businesslike academic severity. You are going to be studying this thing, the shelf tells you. And I really want to. 

I immediately started fantasising about reading all the Canto Classics. Will someone stop me? No. I could do it. I believe in my power to complete strange challenges. Goodreads returns about 130 results for 'Canto Classics'. Would that be so hard? If I read 30 books a year I could do it in five. Stranger things have happened. 

A beautiful Jane Austen, as all bookshops must have.

This is just one of my dreams, brought on by the bookshop, but I also liked the extensive linguistics section. General linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics. They have it all. Every linguistics.

I noticed, too, the very blue series of 'Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought', which intrigued me. They seem frightening, but I like just how sci-fi this general design looks. It enhances that sense of unwieldiness. Yes, we have to show outer space here - this is how endless and vast the topic of 'political thought' is. Mother, I am afraid. Nietzche is going to get me.

In the more general non-fiction section - the place where people who are not attending Cambridge University might just buy a book for fun - I found three books I liked the look of, which I will reveal to you now. 

The first is this beautiful edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. I love the lilies framing the cover, and we have a shining endorsement from Judi Dench. If Judi Dench said it was bad I would have burned its pages in the shop, but she says it's good, so I don't have to do that.

The second is 'The Witches of St. Osyth' by Marion Gibson. I just want to read some witch history, but I also love that spooky image on the front. It evokes American Gothic more than anything else.

Lastly, 'Twilight of the Godlings' by Francis Young. This one looks vaguely romantasy-styled, which is an interesting design choice to see applied to non-fiction. It's not garish, but it looks very youthful and mysterious. I need to know about those Shadowy Beginnings.

These are the books that caught my eye - but which shall I read first? Hmm...

Fighting with my Journal

I think I have now, finally, gotten used to the transparency of my onion skin journal. I have reached an understanding. Sometimes it concerns me, the building obscurity that eventually happens for some pages - drawings rendered more or less invisible by their page-neighbours - but I've come to mostly accept it. It takes a strong mind to embrace the terrors of a see-through journal. And I am that strong mind.

For a while I drew on both sides of every page, but I started to feel like that was causing too much chaos - especially with the way that pencil transfers from page to page with any pressure from the other side of a drawing. I thought, yeah, lets give these pages some more space. One half step further away so that the transparency doesn't get bombarded. It was a broadly good decision, because really, those undersides of each page left alone look pretty nice, and I realised that the best drawings to make, for layering purposes, were ones that incorporated a high contrast between blocks of pencil and blank space.

I'm also trying not to be too precious with this journal. Because its made with this delicate paper, and has its pretty ouroboros design on the front, it announces itself as a special item. I must refute this and declare it filth in order to lose all inhibition and fully enter into the realm of the journal. The task must always be: to ruin the book.

I drew a particularly horrid bird, and what really makes it lovable to me is that I hate it. Aww. I adore my hateable creature.

Eww...

This is exactly what it's all about. Draw a hideous creature. Accept it into your heart. Never look back. New page new unpleasant image. If this goal is met, you are winning.

I really loosened up after drawing as many dogs as I could fit into a page. This was the moment I was unleashed. I became myself through these twelve dogs (Jesus' disciples btw).

After this, I remembered collage existed, and I realised that I needed to paste a chopsticks wrapper in here to really feel complete. There's something really compelling to me about collaging in here, but just sparingly, just occasionally. So you never know when a collage is coming. 

And then it's back to more creatures. More creatures.

More creatures.