august 2026 roundup!

hi everyone!!! i'm trying to write end-of-month summary posts now. this ones a little rambly but i hope you like it. :)

PLAYED

money for girls: amortized by porpentine charity heartscape/xrafstar. 

i've been thinking a lot recently about the path porpentine has taken as an artist. the twine games and essays that they made their name as a creator with were mainly these short poetic prose works, and like. they were GOOD, they were well-constructed, they produced a few scenes and phrases that really touched me at my core, but that touch faded almost as soon as it came. i kept running into the feeling that something immensely interesting existed just beneath the surface, but it was kneecapped before it got the chance to breach. 

then something beautiful happened which is that somewhere along the line porpentine realized they can write characters and dialogue and concrete plots. and thank god bc they are fucking excellent at doing this!!! their more structured writing is specific and gross and visceral and also incredibly funny. one of my favorite exchanges in fiction is from their novel serious weakness, a 600 page eroguro yaoi about school shootings and sexual violence, when the sadist seme is complimenting the uke on the uke’s failed attempt to kill him:

like that shit is so funny. and also so good at conveying the exact sort of subcultures the seme in question is seeped in. i know porpentine has a similar sense of their old work compared to their new– i can’t find it now, but i recall once seeing a tweet from them expressing chagrin at the fact that howling dogs, a short twine game from 2012 about continuing to function through paralytic depression, gets taught in universities, but serious weakness has received almost no institutional attention, journalistic or academic. you get the sense institutions love an artist like porpentine when they’re breaking down trauma in an appropriately dour and easy to digest way and discard them when they start having a little fun with it. god forbid!

WHICH BRINGS US TO MONEY FOR GIRLS. cancer prize is such an alive feeling character. she’s got interests that don’t congrue with the gender performance people expect from her whether you decide to play her as a cis girl or a trans girl (you can even give her endometriosis!). she’s weirdly close with her mom in the way an awkward and slightly developmentally delayed girl of her ambiguous age (the steam page lists her as a 20something but mysteriously still in high school… a trick to get around the steam censors? another incongruence to develop the surreality of the world? who’s to say) often tends to be. she’s in masochistic love with her bully who sadistically loves her right back, and she’s a weak-stomached girl detective with a stalking problem AND a cutting problem. obsessed!

i truly can’t say much about the other characters without spoiling the whole thing, but the world itself is so totally lush and engaging. the peninsula cancer lives on is oceanic, pink, and hyperreal, but rivulets of grime and waste prevent us from getting fully lost in the dream. porpentine loves to juxtapose sweetness and pestilence, and does so very artfully here. the structure of the game itself is designed in such a way that each playthrough only allows you to view a thread or two of the interwoven narrative web. every choice impacts everything else that happens, i literally never know whats going to happen next whenever i replay it. it feels very rich in that way, like i could keep going and going forever and never get sick of it. let’s dance for the hope of the future…………….

pokemon showdown

and lots of it

READ

cockatiel x chameleon by bavitz

very, very good! i'm unsure how much i liked it. 

not for lack of skill on bavitz’s part. it was a fundamentally dissatisfying narrative, one that left me feeling itchy at the end, and that dissatisfaction seems to be the point. bavitz wrote on their blog in response to a critique that made more or less the same points i’m making now, and mentioned their inspiration for the story’s structure:

“I agree that CxC does not have the more traditional structure of Modern Cannibals, but it does have a macro-level structure, one that is mentioned multiple times in the story: That of a Shepard tone, which is an auditory illusion that sounds like it is building to some crescendo even though it never actually increases or decreases its pitch.”

“false crescendo” is a GREAT way to describe what cxc has going on. harper, the protagonist, has so many moments where it seems like she’s going to break out of her amnesiac, worker-drone isolation and sacrifice her own

a lot about the story is probably good. cxc is beautifully rich with paralleling and representation. every element, symbolic or thematic, seems to act as a stand-in for or a foil to another element. i like that, i like how in conversation with itself cxc is. i think the inclusion of real-life tragedies probably ultimately worked in the book’s favor, i think it did effectively serve the point about an isolative society accelerating white apathy and self-involvement, i also think if you read it and your takeaway was “this feels exploitative and tryhard” i wouldn’t tell you you were wrong.

and that’s the thing i keep coming back to! everything was technically weaved together really well, but it’s hard to derive any sense of legitimate meaning from it. the more i probe the more i just get flat symbols, and the thematic richness almost feels like its for thematic richness’s sake. it gestures at these interesting ideas about . appropriate for a book about emptiness, sure, but does emptiness being the point automatically make it good? i don’t know! i don’t know. maybe i’ll reread and write a more in-depth review of it.

the weary blues by langston hughes

i’ve always felt like i don’t “get” poetry, so of course i’m trying to read more of it. hughes has this incredibly strong compassion for the people shunted to dark corners where polite society needn’t think about them. beauty in mundanity but also beauty in cruelty, beauty in pettiness. always love that. he's also very sparing with his language in a way i enjoy. i wish i could emulate that myself- look at how much i'm talking here!

WATCHED

buddy (2026) 

i went in with low expectations because i do not usually click with mascot horror that much but this one actually worked for me. i really liked how hard it went on crafting a really rich alternate reality rather than sticking to the tried and true mascot horror formula of “scary real world animatronic”. it created this suffocating sort of feeling that made everything feel really high-stakes and sinister… hard to escape the monster when he’s the entire world you’re in… not an all timer but i did fuck with it. good movey

obsession (2026)

exactly as good as everyone says it is. inde navarrette you are a STAR.

hunter x hunter s1 (or most of it

way)...

very cool. i’m into it. puts in a lot of effort to make the bonds between the main four feel earned and real. i like that gon is kind of a weird low empathy freak. excited to see where it goes from here.

LISTENED

played list

& ETC...

my little brother went off to college T_T i feel ancient... he's still a middle schooler in my mind

hit up flamecon & animenyc!!! i tried to get a jade harley cosplay together for anyc but alas... my wig was too matted from being in storage for so long. next year though for sure. i got a lot of really cool prints and stickers. my favorite was a super danganronpa 2 one with nagito, hajime, and chiaki as this photograph 

homebrewed my 3ds. slowly but surely making my way through fire emblem: awakening on there.

went to coney island lots & lots

some ruts here and there but a good month all in all >:) now to start my first september as a non-student… how exciting!