Rynling R&D

I don't care, and I wish the movie didn't exist. Lol. Lmao even.

I'm starting to warm up to the idea of an Elden Ring movie, though. If A24 is producing it, it might be okay.

It would be fun to see something along the lines of Beau is Afraid, a batshit insane piece of surrealist art that (I personally think) would have worked much better if it were about Elden Ring. Along those lines, The Green Knight is the most "Dark Souls" movie I've ever seen, and I can totally get behind the idea of a wet-dog, failson protagonist doing his best but failing miserably in an adaptation of Elden Ring. I want to dig my heels into a hardcore exploration of the game's main theme that sometimes a situation is so fucked up that no one can fix it, and that includes you, but you have a darling magic horse and that's not nothing. That's the good kino right there.

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Oh man. It’s been a week. The horrors persist, but so do I.

Is a spider's vision stitched together like ours?
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a0v8wy/is_a_spiders_vision_stitched_together_like_ours/

So, it's reasonable to suppose that information from the spider's primary and secondary eyes is integrated in the spider's brain, and in whatever way a spider has visual experience - which is certainly inconceivable to us - it experiences all its eyes in a single integrated frame. I think you'd kind of need a reason to suppose that spider vision is not integrated.

It's very cool that there are people in the world studying things like this. And, personally speaking, I think it would be fun to have secondary eyes. I love perceiving light and motion, no joke.

I'm doing this research for the story I want to write for the Bloodborne zine (here) btw. Sign-ups for contributors are open until June 20 if you're interested.

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If you’re thinking, “Wow that’s a lot of writing, are you okay,” the answer is that work has been uncommonly infuriating this week, and it’s better that I write pornographic fanfic than an unhinged manifesto. But also, I just really enjoy the weather this time of year. Praise the sun!

Just for shits and giggles (and also inspired by the brilliant fanwork of a friend), I decided to write a few quick stories about Tenna, the villain (sort of) of the recently released Chapter 3 of Deltarune. I thought the idea of shipping him with Spamton, the villain (definitely) of Chapter 2 was funny for a hot second before actually becoming intrigued by the dynamic. What if they were both awful and made each other worse, that sort of thing.

The problem I had initially was how to write Tenna, who we only ever see speaking to an audience. How would his voice translate to a more intimate situation? To get a sense of fandom tastes, I pulled up fic for the ship on AO3 as sorted by the number of bookmarks, which I hoped would filter out most of the slop.

But alas. There is. A whole lot of slop. Very clearly written by GenAI. And people love it. Apparently.

I don't understand this at all. These stories all follow the same beats and use the same vocabulary, and the characters don't speak in their distinctive voices. There's no attempt to engage with the story or lore of the original game, and there's no specificity at all. Why would so many people bookmark fic like this?

Meanwhile, my university has been aggressively integrating GenAI into its software licenses and digital infrastructure, which has been causing huge problems for everyone. To give an example, many incoming students from East Asia or with East Asian heritage can't upload their photos to their university profiles because the software flags them for using AI-generated images. Because all Asians look fake to the algorithm I guess?? At the same time, the East Asian language teachers have been asking the university to pay for licenses for region-specific GenAI tools that might potentially make huge advances in language learning, but the university (which has more money than God) has been ignoring them. Because why would a university want to use GenAI for actual education and pedagogical innovation amirite.

TLDR: This is dystopian and I hate it.

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My department has a lot of foreign students; and, as you might imagine, the current federal administration’s policies have made everything difficult in terms of visas and funding. It’s been an ongoing mess, and this week was especially hectic. I don’t mind doing the work, but I wish it weren’t five times more difficult than it needs to be. These days I take my joy where I can find it.

This week’s joy was that an Aldi grocery store opened three blocks away from my house. What Aldi is known for is its “center aisle,” which functions a bit like Costco in that it features limited quantities of discount seasonal items. Since it was a special occasion, I decided to embrace consumerism and spend $12 on an inflatable plastic splashy pool specifically designed for dogs. My corgi was frightened (as she is of most things), but the Pomeranian absolutely lost her shit. I have never seen a living creature so happy.

Rom is one of the more mysterious characters in Bloodborne, so I want to try to summarize what we actually know about her. Content warning for body horror.

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Anyway, TLDR, this is my theory:

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And that’s essentially what happened to Rom.

After two weeks, I finally finished Chapter 3 of Deltarune. It will probably surprise no one to learn that I got really into the secret Zelda-style minigames that you can access by getting an S-Rank on the first two sections of the main story. That hole was made for me.

Here's how you know I'm enjoying the game: (a) I'm writing an essay about Chapter 3's theme of "having fun" for Sidequest, and (b) I'm writing toxic old man yaoi about Tenna and Spamton.

ETA: Do you ever wonder, like. Why this??????

I'm really enjoying the two newest chapters of Deltarune. There are bits and pieces of the game that remind me of Homestuck, and so I wondered what Andrew Hussie is up to these days. I think I found him on Instagram, and I am simultaneously amazed and 100% unsurprised.

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Symbiosis
https://spicaze.itch.io/symbiosis

Symbiosis is a free-to-play RPG Maker horror game about a murderous mad scientist living in a house in the woods with an adorable child. The story has two endings, and it takes about 25 minutes to play through the game once.

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Symbiosis tells a short but grisly story through simple narrative adventure gameplay intercut with stylishly illustrated cutscenes, and I enjoyed it enough to go back and see both endings. I definitely recommend this game to fans of gothic horror, demonic women, and questionable scientific ethics.