Masala Noir - fellow graphics hoarder publishing organized collections niche enough to be of little general consequence to most and a downright necessity to a few. (See: 8-bit porn games; Cheese labels)
(Copy) V-N - i forgot how i found this but the lore u need to know is its a weird Russian scarf shop with a fun UI and products that feel like buying a slice of the internet.
The Blood Book - modern art history would have you believe that the Dadaists were among the first to create collages as artwork but John Bingley "Bingo" Garland's pieces from the mid-1800s prove otherwise in a time where the art books he was ripping up and reappropriating were mad expensive. Good on him. Stumbled across this gem while mining the public domain for training data which means its up for grabs. Supercollage?
Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome - further proof for the argument that we can't tell a person's affliction by looking at them
Site of Sites - nothing like a repository of well designed websites, amiright?
WebSim - Probably the exact antinthesis to neocities, a procedurally generated website creator. Enter an AI powered web browser that will generate a site for any url you enter, whether or not it currently exists.
Cool Tools
ExcaliDraw - if you've ever tried to drum up a mindmap you'll either find yourself facing a bunch of paid apps or resorting to using powerpoint. ExcaliDraw offers a free in-browser solution
Pixel-Stitch - convert images to cross stitch patterns
Dith - simple img ditherer from the maker of Decker
unconsenting media - more "cool?" than "cool", a database for searching whether the content youre about to watch contains SA and what kind. Im thinking the Flowers in the Attic/VC Andrews adaptations represent a large chunk of the incest category. spoilers.
o8/2O/2o24
newmaterialwant.com - I don't know what this is but i love it. Like the name suggests it generates new materials for you to want, or at least want to stick around a little longer before they disappear. Digital hoarders and archivists beware, you may find yourself screenshotting in panic. Discovered while watching this video on net.art from a small channel. Click the box to begin
zero-editions.org/ - Admonished for subverting SEO in this It's Nice That write up, zero-editions creates a digital hellscape that all web1.0 enthusiasts love, and seems like it would have a prominent feature in the video i mentioned, if the video was made in the future or the website existed in the past, but it actually produces content that is very distinctly today. Once you uncross your eyes to put together what is going on, ypu'll find a lot of work cataloguing the progress of AI generation, exploring the sweetspot of what it still gets wrong, a gap that is rapidly closing. Separate domain (https://the-iconomist.net/) for their publication, includes pdf download of issues past.
florianerousselot.com - another website that ought to be arrested for aggravated assault of your eyeballs. I had actually wanted to link a project of Floriane's, typelab.fr, but it seems to be under password protection for the time being. maybe by the time you (if anyone) reads this it will be back up, worth giving a click if you're into pristine typography
Speaking of typography, i have a couple more typographic thrills. The first I found while searching up the logo for archive.org, when i came across the logo for Letterpress Archive and fancied it enough to investigate. There's some neat stuff on there and apparently its a real place you can visit if youre in the bay area
The second one I've had bookmarked forever, and I can't believe it never sunk in how sick this site was. fontstruct.com is a site with dual purpose. On the one side you have FREE, intuitive, in-browser font creation software, and on the other you have a massive forum of user generated, and most of the time FREE, to download fonts. You can discover new fonts via curated lists, or sort them by various parameters like newest uploads, best rated, etc. My favorite is 'Most Glyphs', which shouldn't make sense as they require arguably the most work, but maybe that just speaks to the dedication of their creators. There's a whole ass community in there too of people pitching in with feedback and rooting people on under their WIP posts. I was gonna say it's like if futurefonts.xyz was less sleek and open source, but that's kind of an oxymoron. :P
Shit, all this font talk reminds me ive been meaning to join the safonts webring. Posting here for other folks who might be so inclined. xo.
06/18/2O24
Las Zinerías
∙ TXTbooks ∙ i don't remember what originally brought me to the site, but I remember it was sold out. Nonetheless i've been having fun browsing their archive, which i wish more zine purveyor sites would include
∙ Cult Pump ∙ I remember exactly what brought me here, a book by graphic savant Lale Westvind, who I had to search for after seeing her segment in this rad video on Painted Comics. Alas, it, GRIP, is coming soon. Even then,, it is in a currency I can't comprehend and since i dont live in and hate to drive to LA ill likely never be able to buy it in person.
Plundering the Public Domain
Th other day I watched this video [yes ive been watching more youtube than normal] about an old Web1.0 site cataloguing a woman (of contested existence)'s journey to turn herself into a double amputee for the sake of the prosthetics she would be bestowed with, and it unlocked a batch of memories in me, a dozen fucked up memory cookies of my own teenage fixations on prosthesis. I'm in the process of collecting media to give the topic its own dedicated page, but I wanted to share this illustrated book I found published in 1899: A Treatise on Artificial Limbshttps://publicdomainreview.org/collection/treatise-on-artificial-limbs/
Its hosted on the Public Domain Review, a site curating all things odd, remarkable and haunting that can be found in the Public Domain, including what is arguably the world's first zine.
Chinese Maximalism
Any person of chinese descent will probably tell you they have an irrational fondness for the garish grocery fliers from the corners of their childhood. There's something about the loud and louder colors that duke it out for attention in a way that lacks thought, taste, or any semblance of "design". Or maybe nobody else considers this shit fondly, but seeing it elevated rubs a nice part of my brain. It pops up in other places outside of grocery fliers but they're probably the most accessible, quintessential iteration of it. The closest thing I can point to for Occidentals is conspiracy posting. Its this default font, primary color, aggressively emphasize everything until nothing stands out, type of magic.
Despite just using the word quintessential im not pretentious enough to use a phrase like "what I like to call...", but prove me wrong that "Chinese Maximalism" isn't the perfect name for my bookmarks sub-folder.
Here's a quick list of recent finds, with the crucial caveat that no artist necessarily needs to be chinese to embody the spirit of this style:
Last month I posted this interview in my monthly update that kind of goes over my new gig. Half of the interview is with a Mr. Sam Bowman, a lead researcher at Anthropic. After reading the interview I came across this pretty keen paper he wrote titled 8 Things to Know About LLMs, which 9,000% of y'all aren't going to be interested in but I'm still going to post it because its my hot website and i do what i want.
When not spending my time raising robot children that will one day overthrow the government, i'm wasting away many hours scouring the internets for all things yokai*. This led me to a supremely decent collection at the international folk art museum, a website with many wonderful hidden corridors, like their Andean folk art collection, and a sick DIY page. Another collection im bonkers over is this collection of Kobe dolls at the Japan Toy Museum, which i became enamored with after watching this video on IG. btw. have yall ever seen an embed code from IG? swear, go click the share button from this vid and copy-paste the one they give, it is more bloated than a body rising up from the bayou. true crime code joke i guess.
*only partially true, because I'll find ways to let the two interests bleed in to each other, I often play creative games with the models centered on Yokai, like developing a Yokai themed tarot deck (including minor arcana and reversals), or today's game, Yokai Highschool.
odie.us Turn any googledoc into an html site and choose your-subdomain-here.odie.us seventhsanctum collected free resources from across the web
Culture
ubu.com free artsy-fartsy films radio.garden google earth for radio stations radiooooo.com same thing with time applied (eg; click Japan and set to 1970)
o1/1O/2o24
‣ TextFX - The collab absolutely NO ONE saw coming.. LUPE FIASCO X GOOGLE. I dont know whether to say "yes, that google" or "that lupe fiasco". You might remember Lupe Fiasco from his verse on that Bun B song, because that's certainly where I remember him from, and you might know google from their conquering of the planet and numerous security alerts whenever you look at another computer that doesnt belong to you. Anyway, this thing is actually pretty cool if you dont use it for it's intended purpose, which is generating bars. Its a stylistic writing tool that has some pretty unique features and if anything is worth exploring solely for its -blank- value.
‣ Playphrase.me - As soon as you start typing in a phrase the site will autoplay scenes from movies across the decades where characters spit out the same lines. This would be great for video essays or annoying your friends, though not both since people that make video essays probably dont have friends.
‣ adelfaure.net - I dont think I can link this site enough. First featured as a source for one of the free webfonts i posted awhile back, its chock full of ASCII resources, tools, and all around fun style
‣ nestflix.fun - As its top-level domain suggests, this site is super fun. its like a page from tvtropes.org got its own dedicated resource, specifically fictional shows and movies that are featured in actual shows or movies. think Jaws 19 in Back to the Future II or the Id Buy That for A Dollar game show in Robocop.
‣ The Cease and Desist Letter Jeanette "Janet" Braun sent to CaffinatedKitti - I can not tell you how much joy The Saga of Rogue Attorney Jeanette Braun has brought me, and seeing it carry into the new year makes my cup runneth over. if you have no idea what this is in reference to this video covers this portion of the story best (tw: british accent). I was going to write something separate detailing the many youtube dramas I was invested in past year, and while that remains to be seen, i wanted to enshrine this small piece as it really stands on its own even without the context. My favorite part, besides the intro, and besides all of it, are the questions on pg 4. Who are you? Who sent you? Who are your comrades? Give me their addresses. I guess one thing which isnt evident from the document itself, is that the recepient's mother and a random theater they never worked at were also CC'd, which, and i cant stress this enough, an actual attorney thought was appropriate.
‣ 施氏食獅史 - Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den (ENG); or, Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
‣ Church of Maizono - Finally to round out this shrine/monument to words, a shrine/monument that leaves me with.. no words.
Tunefind - This site has saved me from so many headaches. Pop in a movie title or television episode and get a full run down of every song that plays in the background, even if it isn't listed on the official soundtrack.
FutureTools.io Every day the amount of AI tools on offer doubles in size. Cataloguing them all is Matt Wolfe, who parses out the best of the best each week in his newsletter or on his youtube channel, and has kindly categorized over 600 of them on this website, with the ability to filter by 'free'. Whether you need to deepfake the president or automate your marketing strategy, its here.
Trace ever see a sick still of an anime and wonder where it came from? Drop it into trace.moe and pretend you're not a poser (Ps. it's evangelion. it's always evangelion)
FLiM unlike the previous search engine, i dont really know exactly how this would come in handy, but its still pretty neat that it exists. basically search a random word or a specific object (like "red telephone") and the site will return examples of where it has popped up in a movie.
GifCities from the fine folks behind archive.org and the internet wayback machine, gifcities allows you to search defunct websites of yesteryear for old school gifs. think under construction animations and welcome to my homepage wordart.
Thingiverse You know Blender is free right? With Thingiverse's vast library of free model files to download as a starting point, there's no excuse for you to not stay on your ass and learn how to make wonky 3d edits or go down to the public library and print out a random doo-hickey at the tech lab (for real, check if your local library has one of these)
Rule34.xxx last but not least, it's the classic, the infamous, the never not unsettling, Rule34. As Rule 34 states, and the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom sadly proves: If it exists, there's porn of it.
o5/15/2O23
The New Inquiry has been one of my favorite online publications for many years running. The site is littered with free thought-provoking articles, including excerpts from their monthly themed issues- which you can access, along with their entire back catalogue, for only two bucks a month! The also have loads of curated link round-ups which was actually the inspiration for this here page.
Frankenstein is an Italian language IRL publication centered on comic strips I cant read, but their site is still fun to go through, dont forget to check out their Stores section a link list of different cool shops across italy that would carry this kind of thing, and ReadingRoom.it -the Italian counterpart to BOUTIQUE MAGS- which will ship titles to your home
neural.it is another Italy based online space and another bookmark ive carried across browsers and new laptops. I first saw the irl version in Taiwan- unlike Frankenstein this one is actually in English. As a digital culture magazine, its a good site to go to when bored and looking for something dead center of the high-brow/crack-pot matrix, plus it doubles as yet another rabbithole of auxiliary links
PONYBOY has a ton of stuff going on but imma be real I mostly skip the articles and use their site mostly for references when im looking for something to sketch with a strong jawbone. Self described as an "underground vintage inspired fashion & music website". Think the kids that went on coke benders in fashion school if they never went on coke benders and shot editorials instead.
o3/03/2O23
Aint nothing ooey-gooey-er than a fake in-browser OS (see Windows 93) and Dayjob.work's site is no exception. It serves as a dual purpose landing page and portfolio for a design company, but if that doesnt suit your fancy, you can just play a round of DOOM. For more surprising places you might find the game, I give you r/itrunsdoom where the beautiful people of the internet have found ways to run Doom on a lawnmower, the photokiosk at CVS, and the viewfinder screen of a Canon EOS. and a price scanner.
If all this talk of DOOM has you jonesing for some fresh-faced killing sprees in space, artist Callum Diggle has inexplicable uploaded the entirety of his selfmade graphic novel "Humanity Lost onto imgur- a story where humans are the aliens invading worlds and unleashing terror across the universe. Though, 'Humanity Lost' is probably a title more apt for this guy's project turning dead pets into drones.
If you ever wanted to know what an editorial or website was using in its titles and text FontsInUse, but if youre anything like me you never wonder such things because you have over a thousand fonts on your computer and know the name of most of them on sight. But FontsInUse serves a greater purpose by acting as a really good source of inspiration for how to pair fonts together, and in the rare instance you dont already have a font in your library, download links are at the ready.
Finally, Monoskop is a contemporary art wiki that's actually pretty cool and boujee alternative to scrolling instagram when you got time to kill. or on the low end you can try this russian version of r/funny, kaifalog.ru.
If these links bring you joy, consider buying me this T-shirt in white, size medium, thanks.
o1/13/2O23
In honor of the first vewy scawy Friday the 13th of the new year, I present to you a psychedelic classic of Japanese dysfunction, 1977's HOUSE. If you haven't heard of this movie, you might have at least seen one of its many impeccable release posters. If youre still not convinced check out the trailer and tell me its not going to be good.
I've been spending even more time than i usually do going through the annals of archive.org, however this week I've gone and added a few items to the collection, an old interview with Charlie Isoe, that isn't very good, but one of the very few I've ever come across. There was something about his style I always liked, a little like if Francis Bacon spent his youth at Upper Playground in San Francisco instead of sex clubs in Berlin.
Only slightly related, in that they both have a certain rawness, is this poem I read years ago in a magazine and never forgot about: What it Look Like by Terrance Hayes (PDF VERSION). I recently dropped the opening lines into this AI-Generated Content Detector on huggingface, which, I have to add, is one of the best website domains I've ever heard.
Last but not least, here is a friendly reminder for any artists out there that SUBMISSIONS ARE STILL OPEN for the annual juried American Photography and American Illustration prizes, until Feb. 3rd and March 3rd respectively. I used to pick up the published winners American Illustration put out in massive hardbound editions, and didnt even realize they had a photography iteration. These contents in particular are really a good place to submit, as the judges are editors from the upper echelons of the magazine industry, and the same people who hire artists to illustrate pieces in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair etc., so if you got the chops, please do this for yourself!
Fuck it. I am here to hook you up. Last week i gave you a glimpse into one of the sites i like to scroll while looking for inspiration. Today I'll add a few more. Most of them come from those no-code site makers like cargo. Which is kind of sad when you think about it. A lot of these sites are amazing but they start to feel like thousands of dollars of student debt screaming their art into the void, razor-sharp aesthetics that at best will be dulled into a bland corporate nubs with parallax animations once they get hired. Please visit these portfolio sites. Find creators you enjoy, follow them on instagram. email them and say youre happy you found them. repost their shit. hire them if you can. make their efforts feel worth it, and applaud their time spent off of soul-templating monsters like wordpress and squarespace.
What a shit name for a superb collection of talent. ok i dont know why im hating on the sites im featuring right now. its not the platforms themselves, its the way the whole internet works right now that i think has me in a stink. but never mind that, theres a lot of cool artists with sites here from all around the world. I do want to put it on record that Readymag's email newsletter isnt half as good as cargo's though it's been recommended twice as much from the accounts i follow.
This is actually a goldmine. One of the cool consequences of quarantine was this elite book fair finally being brought to the masses. Say what you will about the people behind printed matter (ive heard so many conflicting things that I have no right to believe or repeat), but their exhibitors tend to represent the best, the brainiest and bad assest in an industry that lives and dies on aesthetics. Very good place to waste hours and find inspiration.
1o/26/2O22
cargo.site is probably the polar opposite of neocities.org, the platform where i make the site you see before you today. It's almost another one of those run-of-the-mill no-code drag-n-drop site makers, but if the mill was chic as fuck. catering mostly to artist portfolio sites, exploring their use cases or sites in use section is a great place for those who love some good typography or just to digitally wander. AND their weekly newsletter is one of the very few I actually look forward to! if youre into that shit, definitely sign up.
It's where i came across the Craigslist:Now project (pictured below) from internet kook Matthew Bielak. glitched-out in-browser windows is an aesthetic i will never tire of. its a cyberpsychedelic good time, and he has some other fun stuff on his site so go check it out.
speaking of cool projects that spills out into the real world. Im reading a book right now called Rabbits, and it involves this massive game with clues hidden all over the world, a la (that find me game), kinda a la cicada, slightly a la ready player one, and very a la Jejune Institute. Jejune was a fantastic game that used all of san francisco as its board, and i was lucky enough to play a few rounds while living there. You would buy a specific postcard at a shop in China town, or seek out a radio transmission in a specific spot in Dolores park. it was magic and fun, and the inspiration for the AMC show Dispatches from Elsewhere.
wouldya take a look at this css??!
Thinking about Jejune, i looked up their website, which i had never bothered to do before. Jejune Institute ended a few years ago I believe, but it turns out the institute is just one project under the umbrella of an entity called Divine Nonchalance.
There is one project that I suppose could still be considered active, which i might spend some time spelunking in the coming weeks. Last thing I'll say about this is, I found their IG account, and the guy behind all of their projects flat-out roasted Meow Wolf, which i thought was fantastic, as I could see how people might unjustly draw similarities between their work and his own. I wonder what he thinks of MSCHF? What do you think of MSCHF?
I realize i have no way for people to leave comments, and i doubt i even should, as the silence would be deafening, if not defeating.
last but not leasterdly, i recently watched this docuseries my pal clark had kept recommending me on exploring all but abandoned virtual worlds. the series is free up on means.tv- the leftist worker-owned answer to streaming services like netflix. the first and last episodes are easily the best for those who don't have all the time in the world to invest, like i do.
i havent signed up for means.tv yet- there's just so much free content out there, im trying to make it through the rest of my years without a single streaming subscription. which reminds me, i was thinking of starting a search engine that scans titles on those streaming sites of ill-repute, typically hosted in countries youve never heard of or never want to visit, that involve mouse-click jiu-jitsu skills in order to get the player going: fmovies, c1ne, kisscartoons, watchcartoons and the like. which in turn reminds me i was supposed to start a project journal page for this site, to catalogue all the wee dumb DOA idears i keep collecting in my head.
first up we have this wonderful gem from a creator i mentioned in last months linkdump, picsnportraits, who you may recall holds the honorary title of being the only entity i support on patreon, as their sleepcore series is a vital component of my nightly routine and im also kinda poor atm. so. The above video is a seven-and-a-half minute exploration into the work of the first Armenian animation studio, and their lead animators work exploring visions of the future. This episode is just one in a series of videos dilligently exploring Retrofuturism in Animation, and imho, some of the most underrated educational content on the youtubes. I rewatched this one this morning and damn, every frame is putting in the work. do your eyeballs a favor and treat them to something new. hell, do your balls a favor and jerk off to it, who knows what it might do for your inner map?
NEXT. THING.
yall would you look at this game design? above is the cover of a fold-out poster/map for a tabletop rpg i ordered from worldchamp. es so sick! i thought tabletop rpgs were all on some warlocky elven fantasy shit. but this guy turns all that on it's head. two other projects he had that caught my eye are No Game, a weird zine describing their abstract process of creating a game, and CYBERMETAL 2012, who's setting is described thusly:
"A role-playing game that takes place in Pentagram City, a fictional city in an alternative history where a metal band became incredibly popular, and brought about a ritualistic sacrifice of Ronald Reagan, and in doing so, created a rift in dimensions, allowing Hell to come forth into the world. There was a war between the US Gov and the demons of hell, that took place in Pentagram City which became walled off and quarantined from the rest of the world. The demons win the war, and now we find ourselves in Pentagram City, a place that is stuck in time, with technological and cultural progress grinding to a halt, perpetually stuck in the late eighties and nineties after being walled off. When I say walled off, there's a firewall that is literally the impenetrable fires of Hell that have blocked pentagram city off from the rest of the world."
there is a digital ($18USD) and hardcover version ($40USD), and fans have gone on to add extra material and characters to the game. dude has tons of digital content on his itch page (including free games and zines, and even free community downloads of some paid projects if you look hard enough) while all the impeccably made physical products live on the WorldChamp.io website.
turns out there are tons of creators using the same ttrpg skeleton structure to create new worlds that are far removed from dungeons and dragons, just take a look at the website for MÖRK BORG, whose design is simply divine on the UX front.
at this point you might be asking- emily, are you becoming a fucking nerd? and to that i say, check out the beard im sporting on my neck. not only am i dabbling in fantasy games, ive become a mod on a few reddit threads and discord servers, and even ordered hentai-themed keycaps for my "setup" (click keys for full board).
and now that ive picked up all the funny dice i need from my local comic book shop, all i need is friends! le woot.
o8/13/2O22
been bout a month since i did one of these, but i think I have yielded a pretty robust basket of cybercandy in the interim for yall. Today's dump-cover comes from a Femme Type article on Lean Maldonado, who's website is tragically down at time of this writing. Sadder still, her feature project GlyphWorld also seems to be down. I remember when I first saw a glimpse of glyph world in that bright red inclusive graphic design book that was floating around stores that didnt normally sell books (BOLD!), i scribbled down a note to go home and find it, but it was a whole process and i remember it not working out for whatever reason - and it still isnt and i still dont have it. As a consolation, i will offer up another typeface from the same book - STONEWALL- which is free to DL, or Diversity Type, which i found while click-clacking around on FemmeType (there's a lot of fun stuff to be found there if typography is your thing), free for a nominal donation to one of their preferred charities.
Now if you think you done noticed a theme, youre right, theyre all designs stand for something beyond a strong aesthetic. The Femme Type site celebrates women in graphic design, Glyph World is a project centered on growth and the individual's history within the collective, STONEWALL is a "tribute to those that have fought for LGBTQI+ equality and freedom, and to encourage action where inequality and oppression still exist", and as eponymously suggested Diversity Type celebrates and champions diversity. The site also has a fantastic resource list for folks in advertising & design and a really neat slide-deck of artists who contributed to the project.
But wait there's more!
as soon as I saw Diversity Type I was instantly reminded of this gorgeous LOQI bag which was also sold through proof of donation to Voices of Children. While sadly no longer available the charity of course is still open, and LOQI puts out tons of high-quality bags. Ive had my collapsible shopping bag featuring this weird still life crawling with insects for a good 6 or 7 years and has become one of my absolutely necessary every day carry items. That i have never lost the zip pouch its housed in isn't so much a testament to my carefulness, but my willingness to go back to any place i may have left it.
Last on my list of things worth a damn, is the latest issue of DAZED (Summer 2022, Issue 5). While its always been a top-notch fashion and culture rag, I am absolutely gobsmacked at all the dope editorials featured in this season's issue. I cant feature them all, but I have a feeling I might end up scanning half the magazine in, if I can't hunt down the photos online. I promise you wont regret it, and you can find it for $6.66 USD here, if there isnt a local Barnes and Noble in your area to rack it from. (Note: Per usual, they have gone with a multi-cover release so don't be disheartened if you don't come across the one that is pictured below)
This was the first magazine that Ive ever seen that does inclusivity right, featuring so many rad and relatively unknown POC without making a huge fuss over it, or a "theme". If you go through a lot of magazine stands youll know what i mean, if they do center POC they treat it like its a triumph and we should be so fucking grateful that they have done us this favor while they break their arms patting themselves on the back**, or its a one-off and regular programming will resume shortly. This is just a bunch of dope shit that happens to have an onslaught of sick and slick POC creators behind it. love it.
and while DAZED's blog isnt the best, i did find this project, which i gotta admit sounds a little bit brain-breaking.
Jubilee, (1983) - funky animation from russian animator Vladmir Tarasov, described as "Animators from the distant future fly to another planet to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Soviet animation"
Late Night Sci-Fi, (2020) - while I am usually not one for music comprised solely of samples, I am a sucker for albums released on dead or obscure media (like sega genesis cartridges and floppy discs), and this album from AFDS strikes the balance betwix both. The samples come from old ad spots glorifying what was once new media like betamax, the internet, and lazerdisc, and theres even a song called rotten.com [the old stomping grounds of my youth]. AFDS had originally released this one on digital compact cassette, with other releases on VHS and cassette, all of which have sold out. However you can have a listen to other music theyve made, set to vaporwave style VHS collages, on their youtube channel, where most videos are under a hundred views.
Sleepcore - a video series from one of my favorite channels on youtube and only creator i support on Patreon, picsnportraits. Sleepcore is slow media meant to fall asleep to, and is mostly sourced from the public domain. It's how i discovered the Jubilee video, waking up in the middle of the night to a technicolor display of typography in space. The channel has other series covering retrofutrism in media, foreign animators, propoganda and more. Can't recommend enough.
Another round of gems that mostly owes to the good folks at the Internet Archive. It has shot to the top of my most frequented websites this year and I can't endorse wasting your time there enough. They've done so much to catalogue media (digital and otherwise) and make it easily accessible for everyone, so please consider donating a few bucks.
o6/3O/2O22
A lot of the time, I'll be juggling a hundred and one half-baked project ideas, some more fully fleshed than others. In the case of this week's link dump, I was researching imagery to use in a zine I've always wanted to make about McDonald's related murders*, when i found myself rabbitholing into another Mickey D phenomena- it's history of run ins with international anarchist groups. Writing this now, I see why that should come as no surprise, with the whole "alienation of labor"/McDonaldization liberal studies stuff. Regardless, its still pretty fun stuff and these gems ooze an old print aesthetic im happy to see archived and share with y'all.
The above image depicts a rural French McDonalds seized by workers and turned into a food bank during covid, the Washington post article it's sourced from is some experimental editorial in full-screen slide format, and has some cool pics, but if you just want to get the full scoop, I would suggest reading about it here.
this is a super fun gem archived by the Brisbane Solidarity Network. Meant to be a tool of resistance, it is "alternative" handbook for reluctant to radical McDonalds workers that want to stick it to the clown. (Give it a scroll-through or go to the archive page for full page view).
a page I pulled from another anarcho zine project, faithfully reproduced and freely visible on archive.org. Ive really come to recognize the full glory of that site this year. theres tons more on there if you havent fucked around with it, i would highly recommend investing any time u need to waste.
*(that is, murders which took place in, or were somehow related to the golden arches- you'd be surprised at the number of victims that turned up with remnants of a happy meal or big mac in their stomach contents, leading the ME to conclude they were lured in by the promise of hot and crispy french fries. I had actually forgotten about the project and all these links i had saved until i stumbled across this while researching Chinese folk religion)
o4/18/2022-o4/22/2O22
(Babel illustration by Nicolás Ortega for
this (okay) article in the Atlantic.)
I fell into a few archival rabbitholes this week. Here's some of the best gems.
Above: The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel, Author Unknown (1565), 120 engravings of medieval monsters dressed like clergymen with cool hats. You can use the embed above to flip through the book or click to get taken to high-res archival scans. The site that hosts this scan, Gallica, seems to be a compendium of cool old French shits.
The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac† Speaking of old french shits! One of the first stories I read that made me think "literature" might actually be worth reading, written in 1845, set in 1612, and still satisfies my 20th century too-much-trash-tv brain. Its like a Twilight Zone episode for the aristocracy. Other hundred year old tomes that would lead to me giving "classic literature" a chance were Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, but in a more borderline psychedelic stream of consciousness type o' way, that I had already grown to love in writing post my discovery of Henry Miller.
this site is sick as shit for someone like me that loves robots, diagrams, and retrofuturism. It is so thorough. Unfortunately the man who maintained the site, Reuben Hogget, passed away in 2016, whom you can read about in Farewell to One of Robotics' Greatest Citizen Journalists- evidently it was a huge loss to the robot history community, which goes to show how dedicated and dilligent he was, and the impact he left. The article is really sweet, and includes an interview that ends with "His is an excellent example of pursuing a passion to meaningful ends." and who doesn't love someone like that?
†it's pronounced Honorary Ballsack
o4/08/2022-o4/17/2O22
From what I can tell PullStay is a game about a hikikomori (those fools in japan that dont leave their apartment ever, very not.. like.. me. i go outside shut up) that is antagonized into leaving his home and astrally projects his alterego to go on ahead of himself defeating anyone who might bother him, and smashing the hell out of the local convenience store. A solid six years in the making, the game is a labor of love, hope and obsession, from Nito Souji, who himself identifies as hikikomori. The game isn't out yet, but there is a demo on Steam.
This frame in PullStay's trailer (top) immediately reminded me of The Great Adventure of Material World (bottom), an avante-garde videogame created by Chinese artist Lu Yang (her website is absolutely tits).
Finally, no discussion on video games, tits and asian indie developers can be complete without this exceptionally long compilation of Hentai Pixel Games posted to r/PixelArtNSFW. Only about 80% of the links still seem to be working, but the time it took to source this knowledge really puts the "rough" in "thorough". For a glimpse into more fully fleshed Hentai games (pun intended), check out this list of top Hentai sex games from Future of Sex. And when you're done with that, if you're still looking for quirky indie projects to chill your bones, check out some of these gems ive found on itch.io, or these ranked sex simulators to rock your bussy.
Web3 is going great! A virtual timeline that hilariously records and tabulates the scams perpetuated thus far in the name of crypto, defi and unfortunate acts of hodling.
Nvidea's AI ART Playground on the other hand, is a truer representation of what gets me hyped for the the world wide web of tomorrow, insanely powerful tools that anyone can use for free, without coding knowledge. Plus, one of their GANs is named Gau! As in Gau-GAN! History Joke! XD AF, bro. also if you didn't see it (because who did?), my first "post" on this site is to a virtual shmorgasboard of ai shits for u to play with
Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome - further proof for the argument that we can't tell a person's affliction by looking at them
