krad

this looked like a fun reading meme that is currently circulating youtube; gank'd by alaterdate :)

( Read more... )

wondering if live action horror just isn't the genre for me... got through half of nosferatu (2024) tonight and. eh. honestly bored most of the time? i kept thinking 'man i'd rather be drawing or watching the piano right now'. hellsing still remains peak Vampire for me. if i had to grope for what wasn't clicking, i think it was the characters - i just didn't give a shit about them. i've watched a few long old slow movies (lawrence of arabia, etc) but this just felt tedious.

also watched crimson peak sometime back in december, speaking of horror, and it was pretty but i thought much weaker than pan's labyrinth. (i've also seen shape of water and mostly shrug emoji about it).

THIS is why i wanted to pick up my to-reads list again so badly; i find the weirdest coolest rabbit-holes...

so i started reading "When Technocultures Collide" because i think it's the book that this post about blind phreakers came from, and I'm quite interested in the thematic and practical connections between computer hobbyists and disabled folks.

the book itself could be better written (it's academic-heavy enough for my tastes i'm skimming through large chunks), but i cracked up at this throw-away line with an unrelated guy bitching about zines going mainstream; seems like this is one of those evergreen pieces of wank.


but it's in a chapter about another dude -Ninjalicious- who spent good chunks of a decade in a hospital (ayyyy i see you dude), and going urban-exploring in renovated wings, and eventually wrote a reasonably famous series of zines about the experience. apparently he's the godfather of urban exploring in general, wrote *the* manual for it, and even though he's since passed away, there's a cool as hell personal site still online in his honor??

love hearing about people on the margins like this.

handbook of ornamentation by f.s. meyer was an old book i picked up via a neat tumblr link. originally my selfish thought was 'hey i can scan some of these patterns to lightly modify and use for doujinshi ornamentation lol'

turns out this book's a lot more than that! and gave me history of industrial design Thoughts

( Read more... )

so i've been browsing a lot more hentai lately!

part of it is reading the history of hentai recently, and I now feel equipped to pinpoint the visual tropes and how they've evolved or what era of history they were in. another part of the new reading material (lol) is research for the next big gunter/corrin comic strip i want to draw (Fates -where they're from- doujinshi was also notably good in general). :P 

lastly, i guess part of it is boredom with a lot of current comic work ... i like art that makes me feel something, even if it's uncomfortably & overtly sexual at times (i find i can only read hentai in certian moods -not necessarily horny, just more emotionally chill in general vs strict work mode). what's the visual perspective angle of the characters that the artist did that felt too much? was it the sound effects? was it -horror of horrors- the vulnerability? how is it depicted in line weight & the toning?

( anyway, a text review of some selections; sfw read-more but the links are to NSFW sites. )

watched Cool Hand Luke (1967).

( so I got this because my dad quotes it constantly.... )

so i read Knife by Salman Rushdie.

the greatest irony is i had never heard of the dude before he got stabbed in 2022.

the second i heard about the attempted assassination, i was reading about him and immediately brought The Satanic Verses, for which he's most infamous for. Why? Partly out of emotional support to a fellow beleaguered creative, partly because I was concerned the latest attack there would make it harder to get the book. Knife is his account of the before-and-after of the stabbing, recovery, and making sense of life.

* oh, he's the kind of writer that can consistently give you chills. i see why he's so famous (infamous?). honestly even though there wasn't really a super consistent thought-line through the book, it was honestly just nice metaphorically sitting beside him and hearing him ... talk. his casual pros is a constant act of word play. he enjoys words and how they're strung along together. and it's strangely emotionally relatable even though our specific lives don't have much in common.

* i haven't read any nonfiction written after 2017, so hearing "current" events or even little quips about covid specifically was jarring. He makes it work (most times), but it's still. one of the most interesting passages of this is when he's imagining a conversation (debate?) between he and his attempted assassin. and one of the things he brings up is how both the assassin and his own younger son are really good players of call of duty, and isn't it such a strange quirk of fate how they may have matched up with each other unknowingly?  delivered in the style of an "old world" author it's such an interesting blend of old/new.

* he's quite accurate with both the highs and the lows with trauma recovery, as you'd expect it from a writer who lived it. that up-down yo-yo of bad-good-bad-good days, the inexplicable oddness of ICU-level painkillers and night patterns, the psychic aftermath of survival, and living in a meatbag stitched together by what feels like spit and tape.

* he loves his stories and literature - by that i mean he throws out references to other works constantly. he might be the only author that's done that that i'm not immediately irritated with; they're both highbrow and lowbrow works, and after some thought you always get the emotional resonance of the quote. he's not trying to bedazzle you, just sharing a moment of kinship.

i don't know if i'd full throttle recommend this to just anyone; it's good, but it's one of those where you have to want to read it. the kind of work that invites itself in your lap.

finished 'the reproduction of evil' by sue grand

i made a real silly little chart at 1am one night that better summed up where i think this book mentally hit versus a review.




( but if you still want the textual review of sorts... )

Sharing a Home with the Never Ending Man: 15 Years at Studio Ghibli (free to read on archive.org)

( I think glasshard was the one that first mentioned this book, years and years ago.  )

read a few books going to, and coming from the beach this weekend ~ I think one was Art & Fear (won't do a review of that one out of laziness but will probably post a quote or two), and I forget the others. that said, this review's focused on "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell, free to read on archive.org!

i was prepared to dislike this book thinking it was some kind of self help pop culture flavored book much like Save the Cat since I've vaguely heard Campbell's name being adjacent to storytelling building block-y quips like ~*the archetypical heroes's journey*~ but was VERY pleasantly surprised that the tone was way, way different and a hell of a lot more insightful. meaningful in the refreshing sense I get from genuine buddhist gurus.

( going off of my bullet point notes while reading through this:  )