Rynling R&D

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I had a good time with moss and forests this past month, but now it’s hot girl summer, and by “hot girl” I mean Ganondorf. I’ve been collecting a bunch of fun references, and now I’m looking forward to once again being very weird about a fictional character online.

This is what’s been making me happy this month:

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I want to have a “someone was nice to me” category, but this is difficult to quantify. I guess it’s fair to say that I’m grateful to all the people who still leave comments on AO3 and Dreamwidth. I’ve become extremely shy and somewhat isolated in real life, and it really does mean the world to me that people take the time to reach out.

In my last post I casually said that “reading makes you smarter,” but it’s probably worth explaining what that means.

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So I’m not saying that reading will make you a “genius” at your field; only time and practice will do that. Rather, reading helps develop and maintain the basic cognitive skills associated with intelligence. Reading won’t turn you into a rocket scientist, but it will help you remember where you put your car keys.

ChatGPT and its ilk are, as they exist now, dumb as fuck. This is one of the many reasons why it’s distressing to see young people offload basic tasks and decisions onto what’s essentially a Magic 8 Ball. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that a lot of people actually need this cognitive crutch (such as it is) precisely because they’re no longer trained or encouraged to read. And, from where I’m standing, I can see an enormous gap in the performance of students who are able to read and the students who choose not to.

Oh! I forgot to mention:

The Comics Beat, which I now write for, just got its first ever Eisner Award nomination.

For my work at WWAC, I'm (technically) already an Eisner-winning comics writer, and now I (technically) might win it again. Nice!

Also, this past week there a huge social media crashout about Lee Lai's graphic novel Stone Fruit being mediocre and getting undue attention solely because of white guilt. Because my review of the book appears at the top of a Google search, I got a bunch of nasty mentions. I was busy disappearing into the woods, and I totally missed all of this. So much the better honestly.

Disappearing into the woods is great btw. Highly recommended.

I’m still daydreaming about the Digital Terrarium magazine, and this is what I’m considering:

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Part of my motivation for creating a magazine like this is that, as someone with a female-coded name, it’s 99.99% impossible to get anyone to respond to my pitch emails, even when we’re mutuals on social media and I send them a direct message to ping them about the pitch.

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If there’s still to this day no real space for soft and queer (and vaguely female-coded?) voices in video game writing – and if there’s no space for someone like me specifically – then there needs to be more space. Simple as.

While driving through the woods, I've been working with some of my favorite people to create artwork for two upcoming short fiction zines: a reprint of Terrible People (which has a horror-flavored murder mystery theme), and a new zine called Green Dreams: Dark Tales of Botanical Fantasy. In advance of flying back to the States, I also ordered reprints of some previous titles. My zines have yet to receive any attention from more traditional literary circles, but they sell well, get good reviews, and have tons of repeat buyers.

I also think my zines (and the various bookmarks and stickers and miniprints that I include with them) look amazing. I'm slowly learning more about typography, layout, and editing, and my art is gradually getting better too. Each new publication is an improvement on the last. I like to think that I'm doing good work. I spend a lot of time in indie litfic spaces, and I also think that I'm doing something that no one else is even coming remotely close to.

I'm considering starting an actual small press, which I'd like to call "Digital Terrarium." I think it might also be nice to create a magazine to go along with it. I'm extremely aware of how much work that entails, and I also understand why I am 100% the wrong person to do it. Still, what I have that I think a lot of "I'm going to start my own press" people don't are reasonable expectations. For a project like this, I also think my moss mentality is useful: slow but steady, unobtrusive and kind.

So I just saw (this) article about Ohio in The Guardian, and, well,

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This week I wrapped up the spring semester, and I managed to get all of my students through my classes in one piece. It took some work, but everyone showed up, turned everything in, and got an “A.” The grades are in the system, and I’m done. Thank fucking goodness. I am so goddamn exhausted. Touching grass is not enough anymore. I need to disappear into the woods.

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I broke my stupid foot and spent the past week in bed. Playing Bloodborne again would have fixed me; but, since the game is a PlayStation exclusive that’s not available on Steam Deck, I settled for the next best thing and watched a few movies that promised a similar vibe.

It Follows (2014) is a horror movie about an eldritch creature that stalks teenagers in a suburb of Detroit. The conceit is that the creature can look like different people, and its target can only notice it at the edges of their attention.

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Dark City (1998) was released a year before The Matrix, and it’s very close to the same story.

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The Head Hunter (2018) is an hour-long art film that I discovered by reading a Reddit thread about “movies like Dark Souls.”

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The Ninth Gate (1999) is a supernatural mystery in which Johnny Depp pieces together a demonic ritual for a wealthy client by tracking down and comparing the last surviving editions of a forbidden book.

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HUNTER'S MARK: A Bloodborne Anniversary Zine
https://huntersmarkzine.carrd.co/

Hunter’s Mark is a free, digital, open-call fanzine celebrating Bloodborne, announced publicly on the tenth anniversary of the main game and to be released for free on the tenth anniversary of the Old Hunters DLC.

It seems like there are no applications for this project; you just sign up and tell the mods what you're submitting. Sounds good to me!

I've actually been looking for an excuse to write about Rom the Vacuous Spider. Before she was a giant horrible creature, Rom was a scholar at Byrgenwerth College, and I'd like to take a shot at telling her story. My idea is that Rom desired a longer life and deeper insight for the sake of scholarship, and that she was obsessed with the "publish or perish" cult of academic productivity. If nothing else, I've been keeping a running list of fake book titles that might appear in Bloodborne, and this would be a fun opportunity to share my delusions. I'll call my story "Progeny," because... Idk, a swarm of spiders is as good of an analogy for academic publishing as anything.