Rynling R&D

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ☕

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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. 🌿

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."