rynling | Entries tagged with research

Soul Blazer: all things bright and beautiful
https://moegamer.net/2026/07/14/soul-blazer-all-things-bright-and-beautiful/

There was something not only calming and pleasant about the tone in which this game told its story, but something that felt like it carried deeper, spiritual meaning. I hesitate to call it a “religious experience”, because that’s pure hyperbole — but I will say that Soul Blazer is one of the most potent examples of how the ideas and philosophies of a religious outlook on life can be effectively used in a game.

I just started replaying Soul Blazer, a Zelda-style JRPG published by Enix in 1992. The reason I'm returning to Soul Blazer now is because I'm interested in how it alludes to the Buddhist themes of the poet Kenji Miyazawa, so it's interesting to read about the game from a Christian perspective.

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This was not the point of any of these articles, but now I have two questions:

1. There are companies that specialize in deconstructing Shinto shrines?
2. What do people think happened / was going to happen at these shrines?

On a related note, it amuses me that the lore of so many Japanese fantasy stories boils down to:

1. There is an evil sealed underground.
2. Having discovered this site,
3. you could fuck around and find out,
4. but you really shouldn't.

Something I found out recently (in relation to a real estate scandal surrounding the 2021 Tokyo Olympics) is that there are actually hundreds of calamity-sealing underground shrines in Tokyo.

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This artist is a legitimately good and kind person, and I am in platonic love with them and their work. Again, it's weird to summarize someone's career in 500 words, especially since the entirety of their work is online. I collected much more information than I've included here, and I think perhaps I might like to write a Wikipedia entry for this artist over the summer.

It took me 45 minutes to write one sentence...

Reimena Yee began posting a Victorian supernatural mystery comic called The World in Deeper Inspection on Tumblr in May 2011.

...and I'm still not entirely certain that this is accurate. Like, I get the impression that she may have initially started posting the comic on Blogger (or perhaps even DeviantArt) prior to that, and I think she may not have released the full first chapter until 2013. Idk, I don't want to dig too deeply. Even if the artist is a public figure, she's also a real living person, and going back through her social media from more than ten years ago feels weird and gross. I think it's probably best to respect her privacy and move on without becoming mired in minor details.

I'm back to work on my presentation for the Comics Studies conference this coming May. This section is about the comic artist and game developer Abby Howard (of Slay the Princess fame). Each of these paragraphs could easily be expanded into three paragraphs, and obviously I have a ton of footnotes and references. None of that goes in the presentation draft, which needs to fit into a clean 25 minutes. Still, it's weird to put someone's entire career into such a small space.

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In medieval Japanese setsuwa folktales, oni are characterized by their cannibalistic tendencies. What I'd like to do is draw a connection between "eating people" and "being a demon." My discussion is fairly dry, but I should preface this post with a content warning for a description of prion diseases, which are horrifying.

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I don't have any summarizing conclusion; these are just my notes for now.

Meanwhile, in Christianity, it seems that eating the flesh of Christ is good actually, which is perfectly normal I'm sure.

Brick by Brick: An Index for Putting Names to Built Things
https://doshmanziari.tumblr.com/post/660869450082484224/an-index-for-putting-names-to-built-things

Since it may be a long while until I return to this series, entitled Putting Names to Built Things, which looks at the environments of the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekiro and identifies their structural and decorative elements, I wanted to create a post which indexes the entries so far for ease of sharing and reference.

What this amazing person has done in the posts linked from this index is to affix labels of architectural terms on top of screenshots from the Dark Souls series. This is all the vocabulary relating to European architecture I've ever wanted, and I'm so happy I found this Tumblr.

My first impression of the QAnon Anonymous podcast wasn’t great. I admired the quality of the reporting, but the on-air persona of one of the hosts really bothered me. I got back into the podcast after that host did an interview with the Dark Souls podcast in which he dropped the persona and was really sweet and chill, which helped me get over the Gilbert Gottfried obnoxiousness he occasionally projects. Some of the QAA episodes are hit or miss, but I appreciate that they take the real-world political implications of internet culture seriously.

Anyway, one of the older hosts of the podcast, who is a professional fact-checker, has a healthy view of people who make their living as performers and artists. Namely, he says he expects people who make art to hold fringe beliefs, or at least to be more open to fringe beliefs. Politicians and journalists and talent management staff need to be grounded in reality, but “grounded in reality” shouldn’t be what you want or expect from people who create fantasy.

And I was thinking, like, do I have any fringe beliefs? I don’t think I do.

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So I guess that’s my fringe belief: Godzilla was not wrong.

Idk, most of the horror writers I know are fairly chill and sane people in real life. If I had to guess, I’d say that we get our trauma out on paper so we can get on with our lives, and it’s surprisingly effective.

Gnosticism isn’t a religion; it’s a term that describes a set of religious tendencies that were common in the ancient world around the time of Jesus. Trade was flourishing, and ideas were being exchanged along the Silk Road. People from many different cultures would congregate in cities like Damascus, Jerusalem, Persepolis, and Rome, and there were all sorts of street preachers and mystics claiming they could do magic. The basic principles of this magic were as follows:

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From this article, I learned that Madame Blavatsky actually lived in West Philadelphia and operated séances out of her house on Samson Street. I thought I recognized the address, and sure enough, her residence was preserved as the White Dog Café. The restaurant was apparently named for Blavatsky’s dog, who would relieve people’s joint pain by licking their hands and knees.

The White Dog Café raised their prices during the pandemic, which sucks, but I’d still recommend at least getting lunch there if you’re ever in Philadelphia. The food is worth the money, and the interior of that townhouse is amazing. My favorite thing on the menu is their homemade vanilla ice cream complimented with freshly baked dogbone-shaped sugar cookies. Oh and I guess the building is haunted maybe.

ETA: I went to the White Dog Café for lunch the day after I wrote this. It's good, but maybe not worth the money. They also redecorated, and the interior is now a generic sort of New American Modern. Me and my friend spent like $75 on two sandwiches and some ice cream, and we did not see a single ghost.

So I figured out the reason I haven't read anything about nanomachines.

Apparently? They do not actually exist.

I understand how the concept of "fiction" operates, but I feel like such an asshole for not knowing this. Like, are you going to tell me that shrink rays don't exist either? Jesus wept.

This post is not actually about nanotechnology. It's about real estate (sort of).

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If you're wondering how it makes me feel to watch people literally curing cancer while I drink tea and write novels that are never going to be published, the answer is: I try not to think about it too hard.

I reached the point in my nanotech novel where I'm going to have to start doing research. Let's start with what I already know.

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I have been doing my best to read books about castles, but it's difficult. Every single one of these books is about the Great Deeds of Great Men. If you think White Woman Podcasters have a bizarre obsession with mass murderers, I have some bad news for you about White Man Authors. Anyway, scattered in bits and pieces throughout the various celebrations of Glorious Mass Murder, I have managed to find actual information about castles. It's not a lot, but like I said, I am doing my best. Here goes:

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And this is almost all of the concrete information I managed to get from about three hundred pages of reading over the past few days. I guess it's so basic that it's not considered important? But I am learning things, slowly.

Teddy Pozo, “Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft,” in Games Studies (2018)

Bonnie Ruberg, “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games,” in Communication, Culture & Critique (2020)

Neither of these articles is easy to read due to decontextualized citations and poorly defined terminology, but this is what I think their authors are arguing:

(a) It’s not cool for corporations to commodify queer experiences branded as “empathy,”
(b) it’s not the job of indie game designers to sell their personal work as educational content, and
(c) we shouldn’t assume that the default identity of a “gamer” is a straight cisgender male anyway.

In order to protest being discursively commodified for an audience of straight men, a small handful of super-indie game developers have created “games” that push back against the idea that their job is to teach a mainstream audience how to empathize with minorities. I’m putting “games” in scare quotes here because these most of these works are deliberately inaccessible, while some only exist in the form of gallery performance art.

This is my take on the conversation:

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Danah Boyd, “Literacy: Are Today’s Youth Digital Natives?” from It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (2014)

This is a chapter from a longer book that I found a link to on Tumblr, of all places. I’m not sure I want to read an entire ethnographic study about “networked teens,” but this chapter was illuminating. Every year I get a surprising number of students who have close to zero digital literacy, and it goes without saying that I encounter a lot of people like this online as well.

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I feel like a lot of kids manage to pick up some degree of digital literacy purely by osmosis, but what Boyd is arguing is that we shouldn’t take this osmosis for granted. If nothing else, this chapter presents some of the absolutely buck-wild stupid shit that people apparently believed back in the early 2010s, and it’s horrible to say this, but I was amused and entertained.

By the way, (this is the link) to the PDF of the book chapter if you’re interested.