It’s the third day of the New Year! We’ve made it past that week between the 25th and the 1st where nothing felt real and time was a lie. Suddenly, we’re at the part where it’s just another day in another year and we start to settle in and that special sparkle of the first begins to fade (or at least, that’s how I feel).
I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into bookbinding and that’s taken up my attention for the past few days. (More on that later!) My big project right now is typesetting a public domain translation of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere which is a classic of Philippine literature that I’ve just never read. And now I’m reading it and it’s very good? (I’m sitting here, a Jane Austen fan, screaming at social commentary and drama through the lens of visiting other people’s houses, but also screaming because colonialism) (More on this later, too, probably)
But anyway, on the subject of the title of this post: saying what I’m doing so that maybe a future me will be guilt-tripped by present me into actually doing it!
Look, dearest darlings, I am a chronic starter. I have a draft list full of unfinished ideas jostling to be the ones to the finish line (but then the sport metaphor changes and there isn’t a finish line and it’s all really a mess). But despite all that and my inability to finish any post I started for this blog, I did still do some things in the year 2022!
It’s no surpise to anyone, that I, a self-described lover of yearning, absolutely go feral for a lingering hand touch, a little hand spasm, a tight grip of the hand… you know what I’m talking about. I love the little micro movements of tension that people sometimes describe in games, and you can bet that if I’m watching a scene unfold where someone reaches forward to touch someone else’s cheek, I am dying in the chat. My favorite genre of visual media (and, let’s face it, any media) is the “people looking longingly at each other for a long time and maybe there’s a jaw twitch or hand flex and they really want to express their feeling but just can’t” genre.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how I describe my character’s movements and actions in games. While I watch things on Netflix, I’ve assigned a part of my brain to consider what I can learn from how characters interact with each other and how their actions and body language might help build an idea of what they’re thinking, feeling, or otherwise reveal a part of their internal self. Like, what does the slight hesitation before someone turns away mean? What does it mean if someone angles their body away while talking to someone and talks at the wall instead?
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen (also known as Trungles) is a graphic novel about a young boy finding words between worlds, life between cultures, and the power of stories. Tiến, the main character, is trying to find the words to come out as gay to his parents, Vietnamese immigrants. His mother Hiến is far away from her own mother, having come to a new country. The graphic novel intertwines the fairy tales they read together in English with the tales of their own lives as they find the words to come together.
Ages ago in grad school, I toyed with the idea of writing a “Best of [x] year” list for myself. Unfortunately, as many things in grad school go, this was an idea that seemed grand for a minute until faced with the reality of time management and motivation. For the purpose of this post, though, I thought I’d look at what I was feeling strong feelings about in 2019.
Hello! Welcome to this very untidy and contentless bit of the internet where one day I’ll plant some seeds of ideas and they’ll sprout… Or something. It’s all very muddled. But eventually, what will live here will be my thoughts on games, books, and other media, as well as hopefully some original works. And cat pictures. This is all very much an experiment in writing longer things that Tweets and also an experiment in learning a teeny bit of web development. I’m not trained in either writing (I mean, there was school and then college and then grad school, but nothing formally in the world of literature) or coding (aside from the several classes in Python), so I’m excited to learn as I go and hopefully improve.