Stardust Family

I'm not a big manga reader. I occasionally remember it exists and read some volume of something, and then go back to forgetting all about it and only reading books with ZERO pictures. Like some kind of freak. 

But today, spurred on by having watched an anime movie (Your Name, and I don't want to talk about it, I despise it), I ended up perusing a list of recommended manga series, and I was immediately drawn to Stardust Family by Aki Poroyama.

What got me here was the premise, plain and simple. The story takes place in a future Japan, which has introduced a licencing system for parents, i.e. you have to pass an approval in order to have children. This means inspections are carried out on couples who want the right to have a child, and these inspections are carried out by a special class of 'inspector' children.

Wow. That's crazy.

It's a two-volume manga, so it's very short, and what I loved was the pacing here, which is really rapid and steady. It just goes. I also think the characterisation is really well done. Each member of the main trio has their own complex emotional world, and the way they interact and unravel is masterful. 

There's some twistiness within the story which is somewhat abrupt given the space it has to work with, but I felt these were weaved in adeptly and really kept that pace speeding along.

There's some really cool moments across the story, and the enticing dystopian premise held its weight throughout. And I love to see a sweet, nice boyfriend character. As all boyfriends should be.

Four stardust pieces out of five.

★★★★☆

Grandma Thoughts

It's been almost a year since my grandma, Norma, died, and I just realised recently that I haven't felt sad about it in a while. It's a weird thing to realise, but for about six months after it happened, I kept thinking about it and feeling stunned or sad. Suddenly, that thing isn't there anymore. I feel normal. This is just normal.

Here she is with a beautiful robot.

It's kind of an impossible to externalise feeling, and I think every time someone dies it's quite different for a huge amount of reasons, but I really did feel changed by it. I felt, for a while, like the world was really quite different before and after. There are ways in which I feel like I know her better post-death. Like there are things about her I didn't really notice or think about when she was alive. The fact that she tended to wear dark reds and purples and pinks. That's something I think about often, for some reason. Just 'her' colours.

And in a way it makes me happy, not that she's dead but that I know how it works. That I know that there can be a weird joy in whatever it is that a person has left behind. Ideas, memories, objects, colours. That maybe if someone else died it would, in some way, at some point, just be okay.

I feel like now I've had the training unit about your grandma dying and I can easily do stuff like "have a grandma die". I feel oddly emboldened. 

Death is really weird, and I hope it never happens to me. 

A Trip to the Library

It's 12:10am as I write this and it was such a perfectly sunny day today, I really felt true bliss circulating around me. I went over to the local library and saw some trees that had completely lost their pink blossoms, the evidence scattered on the ground but missing from the branches. In the library, there's a section with 2024-2026 releases, colour-coded by year, and I thought that was such a fun section to have. It's right by a large reading nook. Someone had left an Ali Smith book on one of the little tables.

I don't usually make direct blog posts here, I mean, accounts of my day, but there's something about it, when I do, that feels very satisfying. It's the pure blog post. The platonic ideal. The library is wide and mostly empty, and the particular way they had their sections organised interested me, because it was different from the library I visited last. I thought, hmm, I never really think about how different libraries can be. My other local library, that is, the one from where I grew up, has a lot more categories throughout the space. They have a little classics section, from where I pulled the short and delicious The Pearl, a genuinely magical book that I read earlier this year. But today's library has no classics section.

My aunt invariably sends our nebulous family group chat pictures from walks with her dog, just a thing to update us on, routine yet notable. There is something special about any little walk, this action says. And it's true, there is something special about any little walk, if you want there to be.

So of course, another picture of her dog, strolling alongside my granddad, his back to the camera, floats onto my phone. Like so much falling blossom.

Perhaps I will read a book that was released in 2024. 

Several Creatures

I drew some beautiful pink creatures late at night, so here they are. The parade of beings. 

You can really tell that I drew this restful dog first because of how extremely scribbly she is. I was trying out a really loose sketch and ultimately really liked the look of it, but I tightened up the look (not on purpose) for each subsequent creature. I like this first one the best. That big, unexpressive eye.

Then, I was thinking about that butt-in-the-air stretch that cats love doing so much, and essentially drew two versions of it, on a cat and on a dog. Although neither really capture that lowwww curve of the front legs that goes with it.

Oh well, either way, they're stretched.

Lastly, a bunny on her bottom, looking back at something that must be there. Who knows what it could be. 

More 3DS Photography

There's a magic to some 3DS pictures, a kind of realm one can enter where it all makes sense, the particular, faraway look you can find within. As part of my ongoing beautiful obsession with the dear Nintendo 3DS camera, I bathed myself in an ominous pink light and invited the sparkle of its "sparkle" mode to enter seamlessly into this girlish landscape.

And there is something about those flat sparkles, bubbles, stars, and hearts that really does add a sort of cartoon magic to the scene. Here I am, gazing resolutely as time turns and the stars dance. All is as it must be.

I really wanted to use the 3DS's sparkle mode in a way that would make those little decals feel natural and normal. I wanted a way of incorporating them that would make it feel like, yes, of course little sparkles should be there. And what better way, I thought, than a great BLAST of pink light? 

Somehow, it was the perfect choice. 

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.

***

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.