Rynling R&D

I have been so grumpy this month!! I have legitimate reasons for my bad attitude, but wow. I really need to lighten up a little. Here are a few things that made me happy:

She and Her Cat (on Crunchyroll here) is an update on Makoto Shinkai’s debut indie animation. There are four episodes, each of which is about seven minutes long, and they’re filled with soft and relaxing slice-of-life energy.

Brick (on Amazon here) is difficult to describe, but it’s safe to say it’s the opposite of Makoto Shinkai. This movie is from 2005, and it’s a classic noir murder mystery set in and around a Los Angeles high school. The focus is way more on “murder” than it is on “high school,” though. This is Rian Johnson’s debut film, so it’s fair to compare it to Knives Out, but it’s much grittier (in a good way). Also, I’m not super into Kylo Ren, but if you are: he’s there.

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (on Amazon here) is a 2021 collection of gorgeously written nonfiction essays about rewilding. Cal Flynn visited some interesting places to do the reporting for this book, and her descriptions of overgrown ruins are really something special.

Outset Emporium (on Etsy here) sells beautiful hand-painted sculptures of Koroks, pokémon, and other fantasy-themed creatures. He ships from the UK with no trouble at all, and believe me when I say that the quality of the craftsmanship is worth the price. I was going to get myself something from this shop as a present to mark a special occasion, but every day is special goddamn it. I posted a photo of my new Korok friend on Bluesky (here) if you’re interested.

This is what made me happy last month (better late than never):

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day is Fun (on Crunchyroll here) is a 24-episode anime from 2020 in which every episode is exactly one minute long. The anime is exactly what it says on the label, which is a cute slice-of-life comedy about pets. It’s a great way to turn off your brain and relax.

Paranoia Agent (on Crunchyroll here) is a twelve-episode anime produced by the legendary Satoshi Kon. It originally aired in 2004, and it’s got an edgy obsession with urban psychological horror that was popular at the time. The quality of the episodes is somewhat uneven, and there are aspects of the writing that come off as slightly silly here in 2026, but I still consider it a miracle that this anime exists. And the opening theme song is super catchy.

Yokohama Station SF (on Amazon here) is a three-volume seinen manga about a postapocalyptic future in which a train station has expanded to cover the entirety of Japan’s main island. The uncanny architecture and liminal spaces are fantastic, and I also love the worldbuilding and character stories.

The Historian (on Amazon here) is a 700-page monster of a gothic novel originally published in 2005, and it’s about three generations of an academic lineage traveling through Europe in order to hunt down Dracula. This is the third time I’ve read this book, and every page still feels like a masterpiece.

How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed (on Amazon here) is a short essay collection from 1993 about the author’s career as a journalist in Yugoslavia. A lot of what The Historian is actually about is Communism in Eastern Europe (particularly Hungary and Bulgaria), and reading the novel made me nostalgic for Slavenka Drakulić (the journalist)’s writing, which is in fact as entertaining as I remember.

This is what’s been making me happy recently:

Wake Up Dead Man
(the new Knives Out movie)

( Read more... )

Look Back
(a short anime movie about drawing manga)

( Read more... )

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

( Read more... )

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

( Read more... )

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

( Read more... )

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

( Read more... )

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:

( Read more... )

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

( Read more... )

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.

( Read more... )

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...

( Read more... )

...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.