Rynling R&D

This is what’s been making me happy recently:

Wake Up Dead Man
(the new Knives Out movie)

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Look Back
(a short anime movie about drawing manga)

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Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle
(a fantasy comedy manga)

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My New Hobby Craves Violence
(a botanical horror minicomic zine)

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The Disability Center Told Me I Wasn’t Disabled Enough
(a minicomic zine about the artist’s own experience)

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Sakuraco Snack Box
(a box filled with high-quality Japanese snacks)

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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."

This is what’s been making me happy in July:

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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.

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.

Vermis is an illustrated strategy guide for a dark fantasy game that doesn’t exist. Plastiboo, the author and artist, has taken the concept of “fake strategy guide” and executed it with absolute sincerity and fidelity. Both the writing and the crusty “screenshots” have a pitch-perfect clarity of tone and style that invites immersion.

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Of all the books published by Hollow Press, Vermis remains my favorite. I’d recommend it especially to people who don’t want to play Dark Souls (or King’s Field) but are still curious about the atmosphere and flavor of this genre of games. It’s really something special.

I'm working on my essay about Crow Country, and I managed to depress the hell out of myself with this paragraph...

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...and I still think it's deeply upsetting how the United States went straight from "save the whales" to "murder the Muslims." This timeline is so fucked.

ETA: Colette Shade's Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything is interesting, by the way. It's marketed as "a quirky and poignant memoir," but that's bullshit. The book is actually a critical media analysis with razor-sharp insight into American popular culture in the 1990s, and I really enjoyed reading it.

Umberto Eco wrote his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose as a play on semiotics staged by two antagonists, a detective searching for the meaning of signs and a blind theologian whose dogmatic faith lies in the mystery of symbols. As murders accumulate in an ancient abbey filled with forbidden books, the two men circle around one another, unable to communicate due to the innate emptiness of the abstract signifiers that pervade their discourse.

However, Eco subverts the thesis suggested by the closing line of the novel, that only the name of the rose will survive the rose itself, through the blunt signifier of the physicality teased by the erotic tension of Old Man Yaoi. In this paper I will

...I mean listen. The signifiers would be a lot less empty if those two old men kissed. I'm just saying.

This is a vent post, but I need to get something off my chest here so I can be normal elsewhere. Here goes:

Now that I'm updating my book review blog again, I'm starting to get all sorts of messages from people asking where they can find the books I review. I'm flattered, of course, but this is a bizarre question. Like idk, you can get books at the library? Amazon? Your local bookstore?

Sometimes people try to sneak in classist bullshit, like, Oh I wish I could read this book but I don't have the money to buy it. Then how about you spend five minutes on Reddit and learn how to pirate a digital edition?

I would understand if people were asking about books only published in Japan or Europe or India, or about books that are out of print, but it's always mass-market paperbacks.

Obviously I want to be friendly and supportive and helpful, but I'm having trouble understanding this type of inquiry. Presumably these people aren't getting in touch because they think I have some sort of special relationship with a book fairy who flutters in through my bedroom window and leaves books under my pillow while I sleep. So what is it that they're actually asking? Do they genuinely not know how to find or order books?

Any insight or advice is appreciated btw.

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West
https://www.amazon.com/Legions-Early-Medieval-Agrarian-Studies/dp/0300246293/

From North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture in the early medieval period. Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them.

Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities.

Yes!!! Someone wrote a book just for me!

I've always been really curious about European history and culture, but I'm bored to tears by wars and kings. This is exactly the sort of scholarship I've been craving.