Rynling R&D

This is what makes people go hollow in Dark Souls

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:32:15 GMT

A Publisher Pulled a Book for Suspected A.I. Use. I Got My Hands on a Copy. What I Found Was Revealing.
https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/shy-girl-mia-ballard-novel-a-i-book-horror-reddit-hachette-canceled.html

( Read more... )

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Even More Chill Writing Music

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:47:08 GMT

Moonlit Waters
https://nocmar.bandcamp.com/album/moonlit-waters

This is very chill and ambient dungeon synth that's largely unremarkable save for how relaxing it is. Still, I will always prefer human-made lofi dungeon beats over the madness-inducing AI slop that has infested YouTube.

My favorite track is "7. Ancient Birchwood."

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I 💚 Terra Branford

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:22:41 GMT

This is a small happiness, but I still want to celebrate it:

Terra Branford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Branford#Reception

This morning I learned that I'm extensively cited in the Wikipedia article for my favorite video game character! Amazing. What an absolute dream come true.

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Not Wrong

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:27:57 GMT

First Image of Charlie Day in 'Kill Me'
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1qvzecq/first_image_of_charlie_day_in_kill_me_jimmy_wakes/

Jimmy wakes up after attempting suicide, or at least that's what it looks like. Together with Margot, the 911 operator, they set out on a mission to solve the mystery: did someone try to kill him or is the specter of depression haunting him?

I am mainly here for the top comment:
Weird way to film Luigi’s Mansion but I’ll keep an open mind.

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I'm jealous of NYC's hot mayor

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:04:08 GMT

Mamdani Shuts Down NYC’s Disastrous AI Chatbot
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-chatbot-mamdani

In a press conference held last week, Mamdani made it a point to single out New York City’s large language model as a target for destruction. “The previous administration had an AI chatbot that was functionally unusable,” Mamdani said. “It was costing the administration around half a million dollars. That, in and of itself, is not something that can bridge the budget gap, but it’s an indication of the ways in which money has been spent while refusing to account for the actual costs of what these programs are.”

Indeed, the bot is now dead.

Good for him. Amazing how so many of these stupid problems are so easy to fix.

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Let's disappear into a dark forest with mama

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:03:33 GMT

WHISPERS
https://www.neilburnell.com/whispers

Burnell was inspired by a visit to Wistman’s Wood, a remote, upland area of old, gnarled oak. Burnell’s images offer a glimpse of moss-coated limbs and fern-covered forest floors that seem to freeze time.

Dartmoor National Park advises visitors to avoid walking through Wistman’s Wood to allow it to heal from damage caused by overtourism during the pandemic, but the children yearn for moss-coated limbs and fern-covered forest floors.

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Game Poems #1

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:54:14 GMT

Game Poems #1
https://www.gamepoems.com/issue01/

Game Poems is an interactive magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form videogames by publishing new work directly in a playable format.

I'm gonna be real, this project seems extremely pretentious in a very cringe way. Still, maybe some of the games themselves are good? I'm looking forward to exploring the collection.

( Read more... )

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This is exactly how I remember it

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:20:47 GMT

The Final Kakariko Reveal
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTlCE3tkcnA/

"I don't need Ocarina of Time to be remade with current-gen graphics," I said, like a clown.

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When the hog is giant, and also weed

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:11:03 GMT

Controlled Plant Lists
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/pda/plants-land-water/plant-industry/noxious-weeds-and-controlled-plants/controlled-plant-noxious-weed-lists

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I noticed that there's something called "giant hogsweed" at the top of the Class A list. That's a great name, so I googled it, and wow. Giant hogsweed looks like Queen Anne's lace (a lovely white wildflower that's all over London), but it's substantially larger. And I mean like. Substantially. If you're into botanical horror, this is a fun one.

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The 32bit era reached out to me like a Michelangelo painting

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:18:47 GMT

Vermis: Sounds of the World
https://radagasttenderofbeasts.bandcamp.com/album/sounds-of-the-world-vermis-vol-1-melodies-of-the-unknown

The top comment on this album says it best:

Every track fits that book like skin on bone. Same fever-dream vibe. You get that ache again—nostalgia for a game you never played.

Also: I got the cassette, but no cassette player. Therefore, the cassette tape lays untouched until a future adventurer pulls it from my clasped, mummified hand; it is an object of puissance.

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Another indie comics collective bites the dust

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:51:51 GMT

The Hiveworks Guild Statement on Hiveworks Comics
https://cartoonist.coop/hiveworks-guild-statement/

Hiveworks has failed to provide its advertised services, has bled talent and downsized dramatically, and has revealed a massive $340,000 worth of debt that the Guild became aware of in early 2025. We now feel it is imperative to put on record our history with Hiveworks – both to stand as proof of what we have tried to accomplish, and also serve as a warning to those who may consider associating professionally with the company founders.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Discord mod drama never ends well. I know the complaint of these artists goes far beyond "mod drama," but still. I feel like I've seen all of this before.

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Lofi beats to sparkle and relax to

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:13:58 GMT

はじける光 by Amalume
(on YouTube here)

Because I unironically want my life to have the soundtrack of a PS1 game, I spend a lot of time seeking out lo-fi instrumentals. This one in particular has gotten me through the past few days, when the roads and the grocery stores have been especially intense.

If you celebrate Christmas, I'm sending love and good wishes for your family to behave. If not, I'm sending love and good wishes for tasty Chinese food and a nice movie. ☕

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Re: Project Kat

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:03:38 GMT

I also want to share this illustration from the developer's page on Itch.io, because it's a mood.

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Velvetyne Fonts

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:17:22 GMT

Velvetyne
https://velvetyne.fr/

Velvetyne is a collective dedicated to researching and disseminating typography and typeface creation. Together, we give life to fonts and graphical objects under open licenses, allowing for their use, modification, and redistribution.

This is a cool collection of free-to-use fonts. The website design is quite nice too.

I learned about this resource via a fantastic work on AO3 (here) in which the artist used some of these fonts on postage stamp designs showcasing the flora and fauna of Breath of the Wild.

This piece was created for the doodle4doodle exchange, which just went live yesterday and has been incredibly successful. There's a lot of interesting art in this collection, and people have been leaving tons of super-positive comments. What a joy, honestly.

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Atticus

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:14:52 GMT

Atticus
https://www.atticus.io/

Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software.

Ohhhhhhhhh I’ve been looking for something like this. I knew there was a specialty ebook publishing software for Apple, so it’s good to see that there’s one for PC as well.

Next year I’d like to start my own press and put some of my zines on Amazon as ebooks. I’d actually be happy to do this right now, but I need to save enough money to (1) buy ISBNs, (2) compensate the cover artists, and (3) get this software, I guess.

If you’re wondering: InDesign moved to a subscription model, and it can burn.

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El problema es al capitalismo

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:27:29 GMT

For the past twenty years, two things have been happening in 2D animation. First, American studios have been offshoring in-between frames to Asia (as was the case in Adventure Time and Steven Universe). Second, Japanese studios have started to do the same thing after being accused of literally killing young people in their own industry by forcing them to create in-between frames under grueling conditions. I've linked to and excerpted two articles under the cut.

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To me, the antidote to the "line must always go up" issue with larger studios seems to be smaller studios that are largely independent from such concerns. The problem is that, especially for 2D animation, production is extremely labor-intensive, mainly because of the necessity of creating in-between frames. If you're a manic college student whose body still works, maybe you can do this labor, and you can do it with joy. Back before everyone deleted their accounts, however, Twitter was filled with comics drawn by indie animators in their late 20s explaining why they were quitting: working that hard fucks you up both physically and psychologically. The labor is literally disabling.

Based on the foundation of work pioneered by 3D animation, the generation of in-between frames by AI could be a good and useful application for the technology as a labor-saving tool. It has so much potential, and I hate that it's being used against artists, specifically with the aim of eliminating them entirely. The technology has an amazing potential to solve critical problems that have persisted in the animation industry for decades; but, instead of empowering artists, it's become an existential threat. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

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Kickstarting for Fun and... Probably Not Profit tbh

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:10:15 GMT

The Grand Coven Library -- Solo RPG Zine
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skoticus/the-grand-coven-library-solo-rpg-zine/description

I've been thinking of perhaps using Kickstarter to fund the initial print run of my Ruins zine. I've been hesitant to do anything like this for various reasons, but I found a successful project that might serve as a good template. I don't think I'm going to get 220 backers donating $4000, but I could probably put together a page like this.

Ordering 50 full-color zines from the printer I currently use is about $300, and that seems like a reasonable goal. I actually have a copy of the zine listed above, and it's just a small, 16-page, black-and-white stapled zine made with a home printer. If a physical copy of something like this can go for $10 before shipping, I can probably get away with asking for something similar, at which point I'd only need 10-20 backers for a successful project. That's doable, right?

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A shrunken and fragmented media industry

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 13:46:00 GMT

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem
https://thewalrus.ca/the-publishing-industry-has-a-gambling-problem/

If buying the debut is a rollicking night at the craps table, then the sophomore project is the sober morning after. Gone is the clean slate. What publishers really want to see, McGrath says, is growth. “More than any particular number, they’re looking to see a track that is always on the rise.” This is impossible to prove after only one book, especially a book that loses the publisher money. Which is to say: almost all of them.

( Read more... )

Idk man. Fun times. I'm doing my best to write and publish reviews; and, despite everything, I think my own stories are worth the struggle and anxiety of the publication game. Still, I wish everything didn't have to be so difficult.

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The Narcotized Text

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:54:52 GMT

Large Language Muddle
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/

But a still graver scandal of AI — like its hydra-head sibling, cryptocurrency — is the technology’s colossal wastefulness. The untold billions firehosed by investors into its development; the water-guzzling data centers draining the parched exurbs of Phoenix and Dallas; the yeti-size carbon footprint of the sector as a whole — and for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.

We're now a month into the semester, and I'm working my way through my classes' first batch of reading responses. It's impossible to exaggerate how obvious the computer-generated essays are. How obvious, and how insulting.

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So, to me, this essay isn't wrong, necessarily, but it demonstrates an onanistic obsession with intellectual privilege that runs counter to its stated goal of resisting the encroachment of LLMs into public discourse. As the market for writing shrinks due to lack of funding, building even higher walls around "the literary community" isn't effective praxis.

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Monsters + Flowers

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:55:49 GMT

Silksong
https://hannahlockillustration.tumblr.com/post/794407609977421825/silksong-just-beat-phantom-in-the-game-u-where

I love Hannah Lock's art in general, and I especially love this illustration in particular.

I'm linking to the piece here as a reference to myself. What I hear is that the way to develop your style as an artist is to allow yourself to be as horny as you need to be about one specific thing, and this is exactly the sort of thing I can't get enough of: A little guy in a lushly green environment. This is, for example, why I still love the Zelda games despite also kind of genuinely hating the Zelda games.

While studying my social media metrics over the past two years (which is a totally normal thing to do), I realized that reception is totally random. In addition, nothing I draw is ever going to do numbers in the current social media ecosystem. So why not give up and do whatever I want instead? Specifically, given that I love color and composition but suck at linework, why not loosen up a bit and just fill the page with rough lines and color blocks? And if I draw dozens of pieces just like the illustration I linked to above, so much the better! In the art world I believe they call this a "theme."

I have a handful of pieces I need to wrap up; but after that, it's little guys in green environments time. 🌿

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Git Gud

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:59:53 GMT

How to Install Silksong mods on the Steam Deck
https://blog.joshnichols.com/post/how-to-install-silksong-mods-on-the-steam-deck/

I spent more than an hour following this guide and troubleshooting possible issues, but I couldn't for the life of me get any of the mods to work. The windows visualization of my Steam Deck system is slightly different from the system of the guy who made this video tutorial, and I suspect that my issue is probably something along the lines of "you put the wrong files in the wrong folder." But who can say.

And this is such a shame, honestly. Silksong is a gorgeous and fascinating game, but its developers seem to have assumed that everyone has spent the past seven years getting a PhD in Hollow Knight. Enemies move twice as fast, hit twice as hard, and have twice as much HP. In contrast, Hornet only gets half as many upgrades, which are only half as effective. Unless you have professional-level reflexes, some of the bosses are impossible.

Given the immense popularity of Hollow Knight, I question the decision of the Silksong developers not to include the sort of simple quality-of-life and accessibility features that are available through mods. I don't mind difficult games, but Silksong is severely unbalanced. I kind of want to put the devs in a Saw trap where they have to sacrifice one of their fingers for each accessibility feature they refuse to include.

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To enthusiasts, the dead mall is a feeling

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:09:30 GMT

Ghost in the Mall: The Affective and Hauntological Potential of Dead Mall Ruins
https://capaciousjournal.com/article/ghost-in-the-mall/

In the dead mall the dream of mass consumer culture is disenchanted – the stores are closed, there are no products on the shelf, no running water fountains, no more vibrant exciting consumer interiors. And yet, as the enthusiasts’ reflections demonstrate, the utopian desires of the mall remain a spectral affectual trace haunting the hallways once filled with people and products.

Not gonna lie, I love the concept of "spectral affect." I also admire how the author of this article references The Mushroom at the End of the World (my beloved):

Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, ruins are lively places – places where unexpected things may emerge. I approach the dead mall like Anna Tsing (2015) does the abandoned industrial forests where matsutake mushrooms grow. The matsutake alerts us to an important question: what grows on the edges of our capitalist worlds, in our capitalist ruins? Inspired by Tsing, I practice an "art of noticing" – looking with a hopeful eye at the ruins of dead malls.

I've been rereading Tsing's matsutake book alongside Fredric Jameson, and both authors are interesting companions on the road to rethinking what it means to live in the ruins of a decaying empire. As a follow-up to In Praise of Moss, it might be cool to make a new zine titled something like "In Praise of Decay: The Mushroom Model of Degrowth."

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We have decaying gothic castles at home

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:48:52 GMT

A tour of dead and dying malls around Philadelphia
https://billypenn.com/2022/08/01/philadelphia-malls-tour-moorestown-exton-gallery-neshaminy-oxford/

Now officially called Voorhees Town Center, following a failed 2007 rebrand, the mall is a ghost town. Footsteps echo ominously through empty tile halls that contain just four or five operational storefronts, including a karate dojo and an inexplicably new-looking Bath & Body Works. The handsome corporate modern-style food court, complete with hotel lobby palm trees, is completely vacant. Every restaurant and every concession stand has closed, leaving nothing behind but dozens of tables and a few workers from a nearby behavioral health clinic enjoying their bring-from-home lunch in uncanny silence.

I also appreciate the writer's take on the Lovecraftian architecture of the King of Prussia mall:

The interior takes on the uncanny geometry and baffling architecture of a Las Vegas casino. The packed hallways seem to fold in on themselves, leaving you disoriented among apparently endless sunlit atriums and multiple redundant food courts.

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DeviantArt is a dead mall

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:43:59 GMT

The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery
https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html

It’s not unlikely, as WyerframeZ surmised, that someone constructed a low-effort bot network that could hold up a self-perpetuating money-embezzlement scheme: Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the “art” gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat.

This is an interesting article from May 2024 that meticulously documents what's been happening to DeviantArt since late 2022. It's really sad... and kind of spooky.

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Definitely not haunted even a little

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:08:21 GMT

Old LA Zoo in Griffith Park: An Abandoned Zoo
https://californiathroughmylens.com/old-la-zoo-griffith-park/

The Old LA Zoo is what remains of the original Los Angeles Zoo that was simply left in its place when the zoo changed locations. Also, picnic benches were added to some of the old animal areas, and it was adopted into Griffith Park, which welcomes tons of visitors each day. The zoo is a truly unique location in the urban jungle that is Los Angeles.

Something I appreciate about this abandoned zoo is that they're not even trying to keep people out; they just put up a few signs that say "no smoking" and left it at that. Fair enough.

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