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I wanted to write an update about my writing progress!

Here we go!

I've spent the past few weeks playing Wuthering Waves among a scattering of other live service gambling games ("gacha"). Wuthering Waves is almost sinfully fun and it really turned on my head a lot of things I thought I couldn't really get into in games. It is so much more nakedly a power fantasy than any other game I've played, including most of these gacha games. Yes, every gacha game protagonist is special-- but some are special like the Commander from GFL and GFL2 in that she's been witness and participant to a lot of dreadful and awe-inspiring things that mainly make her feel miserable and utterly disempowered. Some are special like the Traveler from Genshin Impact who is a mysterious magical isekai foreigner who gets to sample food from every continent and be saved in cutscene battles she should've won by new characters they need to hype up for the gacha. And some are special like the Rover from Wuthering Waves in that she is the most important person in the world and everyone wants to have sex with her. While the construction of this was capital-R Ridiculous at the start of the game, it starts to really catalyze during the Shorekeeper arc of the story-- that story made me *feel* special, and the way the Rover's relationship and what she's done to and for Shorekeeper and what she's willing to do now, catalyze Shorekeeper as a character as well, turns out really compelling!

In a sense, I just couldn't understand power fantasy until they made one really explicitly for me.

The Rinascita story is also really good for similar reasons. During Jinzhou they hadn't locked in what their core competency was-- giving you cool girlfriends who are deeply important, story relevant people and madly infatuated with you. I'm sorry to Chixia and Yangyang-- you guys have nothing on Shorekeeper and Carlotta. I haven't finished it yet, but I LOVE everything they're doing with Carlotta especially. Just keep giving me girlfriends that fall into my arms in dangerous situations, dance with me in romantically charged stage performances, and have to participate in grand masquerades with me to save the world. Never show a man in this game again. Just keep making cool girlfriends with hidden depths and grand tragedies behind them.

My wife and I have been watching like every star trek show as our like, wifely bonding time after dinner every day, and we recently decided to watch Umamusume: Cinderella Gray instead of watching more Star Trek, whenever there is Umamusume: Cinderella Gray to watch. The sheer concentration of hype moments, and aura, had my skin brimming, after years of post-dinner watching of sedate american television. Oguri Cap is incredible. The sheer vacuum which inhabits her head makes every horse girl around her have womb palpitations when she confronts adversity through sheer ashen-haired sportsgirl swag. Uma Musume is the sports anime with girls you've been wanting to watch. Watch the horse anime. Shut up and watch the horse anime. My favorite horse girl other than Oguri Cap is Norn Ace. You can find art on twitter where Oguri Cap is dicking down Norn Ace HARD from the back. And I thought that was supposed to be illegal to do about horse girls!

Because of the unique characteristics of the unending nightmare world in which my fleshly cage is presently confined, and from which my mortal soul will never escape even when I die, which I hope to God is any day now-- I bought several books by my favorite German-British man Adam Tooze, whose focus on economic angles to history makes him not only deeply refreshing to me as a reader of history, but also quite salient. His book Shutdown, which I'm working through now, gave me a new perspective on the sheer scale of economic chaos that was brought about by the novel coronavirus in 2020, how close to the precipice the global economy and its various tentacles came, and the particular policy architectures that led to the world we experienced thereafter. I haven't finished the book. It's been fascinating. I think if you will read one British man who grew up in Germany and writes deep economic histories of world wars and modern economic crashes-- make it this guy, probably. If you want to or whatever.

Picking up the reading habit again made me remember something important about myself. Something I had to do perhaps? Oh yes-- I had to write.

But writing needs inspiration. And you can get inspiration (unconfirmed) by reading things.

I purchased a beautiful hardcover edition of the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. The Cthulhu Mythos was very influential to me, as well as a few other random stories of his-- but I'd never read some of that other weird shit. That REAL weird shit. I never read "The Alchemist." That story has a jumpscare in it! Reading through a bunch of early pulp Lovecraft made me want to read more pulp magazines, such as "Adventure!" and "Weird Tales", both of which are available on the Internet Archive. So I read a few random issues of "Adventure!" and "Weird Tales." Partially, I also hoped to learn something about the dynamism of early pulp writing, with its sparse prose and punchy action, and its ability to evoke the rich mindscapes which seemed to inspire early pulp magazine writers from which much of the fiction stylings I came to enjoy draw some part of their DNA-- what I learned was this. Pulp magazines are CRAZY racist. They are MORE racist than you THINK they are without having actually experienced it. You guessing how racist they are is a mere iota of its racism. If you think Lovecraft is racist, some of the shit in "Adventure!" magazine would give you heart palpitations-- and maybe womb palpitations.

Having had it confirmed to me that-- well, that pulp writers are dirtbags and racist I guess-- I decided to finally prepare myself to return to my writing, which was a thing I recalled that I did when I was not having adventures with sexual anime women or reading racist literature. In order to return to the youthful vibrancy with which I first picked up a pen to write my first original works of fiction in 2005 (I wrote fanfiction before that exclusively), I explored some ancient luminaries in the genre of "magic girl falls out of the sky on a shitty normal guy and changes his life" (the genre of my first original work, which I wrote when I was 16 years old, except that instead of a shitty normal guy, mine had a shitty normal girl)-- I started to reread 2002's "Erementar Gerad." Erementar Gerad was the first sort of this story which I experienced-- this was before Shakugan No Shana, which is the one that made realize that there was something here, but also, that I wasn't going to be the person to extract anything from it. But anyway-- Erementar Gerad fucking sucks-- so instead I started to reread 2005's "Kurokami". Kurokami is a manga I spent my youth telling people was "better than Naruto" (which it is, because Naruto is Insanely Bad) and that they should read it instead of Naruto (they Should do this also). This was likely almost entirely motivated by Kuro herself, the protagonist, a punchy girl with shonenboy youngman swag. The choice of cast for this is so weird in a good way. An OL, her dirtbag gamedev boyfriend, and a homeless girl from a species of super-powered humanoids that live secretly among humans while not, themselves, identifying as humans. I felt myself reconnecting with some of the DNA for some of my fixations. Kurokami is also incredibly violent. Kuro gets *fucked up*-- she *barfs blood* from having her guts Heavy Attacked by thugs in every battle. Her durability is one of her main assets in battle, much like any shonenboy protagonist. It is rather delightful. I'm still reading, but I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I still like Kurokami. The protagonist boy sucks but that's like-- every protagonist boy ever in any of these. It also has that kind of bleak interesting korean touch of having its setting be a major metropolitan area and having a lot of the drama involve juggling day jobs and socioeconomic advancement with dudes who shoot beams trying to fucking kill you.

Reading "Kurokami" led me to think about other korean and korean-adjacent comic books which I read as a young person. I thought "Koreans made the GOOD manga." In an effort to perhaps immediately correct myself I recalled, dimly the title "Freezing" and after checking it out I remembered that it was one of the worst comic books I've ever read in my entire life, and I put it away very promptly. The "worst comic books I've ever read in my life" thought led me to take a peek at "Shitsurakuen" (not Korean) which has such an absolute dogshit ending that I despise it incredibly thoroughly despite the art being pretty good. Even if it didn't have the ending, Shitsurakuen is mostly bad. (I forgive Gangan for this, however, because of Kakegurui). Too bad about everything. You can do worse than copying Utena-- and MANY people have, and have done worse with it. Witch From Mercury is not new in the 'cribbing from Utena' game-- we've got SO MUCH WORSE awaiting you in Dynasty Scans if that's what you're into. After becoming lost in the alleyway of "the worst things I've ever experienced" by, for some reason, also rereading some Ubel Blatt (how do you make Berserk with Elf Twinks this boring)-- I reread some of Kyouchou Rettou. I'm not ready to speak about Kyouchou Rettou at length.

Then in an effort to treat myself at least okay, I reread some of "Immortal Regis". Juder's art is REALLY good-- I really like the character designs in Immortal Regis, and in Juder's pornographic work "Lillith's Cord." They are really weird and unique. The faces especially are kinda distinctive, like hyperreal anime style (hyperreal as in Way Way Not Real At All by the way, in that way). Did you know that Juder is a husband and wife team? That was crazy to me. I just thought it was one horny Korean man this entire time. Don't judge a book by its cover, dear reader-- for all you know Kyouchou Rettou is written by a woman. (Kyouchou Rettou is NOT written by a woman.) (I went and checked the twitter account for Yasutaka Fujimi of "Kyouchou Rettou" fame, which the bio says is managed by their wife. Okay now I straight up don't know anymore. I straight up don't know about a lot of things lately.)

In the midst of a fugue state of experiencing Garbage manga and manwha from my youth and post-youth (and Kurokami and Immortal Regis, which are at least Not Garbage)-- I decided to read Juder's pornographic webtoon "Lillith's Cord." I discovered that, at some point in the distant past, I had made this decision already-- I had perhaps undergone this entire arc once before and already had not only a Lezhin account, but also several thousand coins with which to purchase chapters of Lillith's Cord. Lezhin's business model always puzzled me, in the way that a business model which is entrenched in an industry that you are partially engaging with but do not engage with daily, puzzles you. I play Gacha games Every Day, and yet Lezhin's "coin bullshit" made me recoil on my second rediscovery of it. Nevertheless, I read several beautiful full color pages of mildly kinky pornography drawn by my favorite Korean husband and wife artist duo. I had a pretty good time with it. It even has a couple kinda noncon lesbian scenes! Maybe I'm not ready to fully talk about Lillith's Cord yet. Where was I? I had six million tabs open on Firefox. Full of nostalgic Madiha mangas, good and bad, from Madiha's past. Some random wikipedia and google maps pages about sites in Hungary, for some reason. Several pixiv tags full of art of Carlotta from Wuthering Waves.

I had been trying to do something-- and that something was to recall that Kobayashi Ritz the author of "Saki" (written AND illustrated by!) was a woman, and that Saki got WEIRD with girl's bodies in ways that MOGGED my GOATs of weird ass manga about women. So I reread "Saki". At the start, Saki is almost prosaic, and yet, it is also literally genius. The mahjong powers are great. I love the girl who just goes for bad waits. It felt like a cute bookend to start watching Umamusume and then start reading Saki. Kobayashi Ritz has been writing (AND illustrating!) Saki for almost 20 years. I feel like there are people in the world who would drop dead if you made them wait 20 years for the end of a story that they started reading in 2006. For it to possibly not even be CLOSE to complete after 20 years, WHILE the girl's breasts have been getting bigger and bigger to ridiculous degrees the entire time-- I feel like such a thing would KILL my readers where they stand if I were to act like this--

Readers-- ?? I have--?

"You know what else was made by a female mangaka?" my brain asked me then. I responded "NANA" which I have never read and then did not read. Because my brain replied "Deadman Wonderland" and I was stunned. Deadman Wonderland was written (and illustrated by? no?) by a woman? Deadman Wonderland SUCKED. I reread some of Deadman Wonderland and I remembered that-- I had read SO MANY mangas about having a superpowered magic girlfriend. I read some "Shakugan No Shana." (By some I mean like-- literally a few chapters--) I read some Zero No Tsukaima because it has Noizi Itou character designs also (that's a woman! by the way! She even worked on some eroge! You really can't judge a cover by the books! That she illustrates!).

[Editor's Note: Noizi Itou did NOT illustrate for Zero No Tsukaima?]

I read a little bit of To Aru No Majutsu-- one of my guilty pleasures. Everything about it sucks. And yet I can't help but be fascinated by its magic vs psychics setting and all the cute and hot anime women in it. Wait-- magic-- psychics? I thought-- am I forgetting something? I had an important question for myself: does "Guilty Crown" count as a magical girlfriend show? The magic comes from the guy's hand-- and not the girlfriend-- but also from the girlfriend. I really like Redjuice's art. It's too bad about the thing that gorgeous character design got stuck in. I thought about Aldnoah Zero because for some reason Guilty Crown, Valvrave the Liberator (which SUCKS) and Aldnoah Zero are kinda stuck to each other in my head as "mid mecha anime" except Guilty Crown and Valvrave are TERRIBLE and Aldnoah Zero doesn't really deserve the association. Aldnoah Zero was fun! I have a friend who really likes the OP where the princess pulls out a gun. More mecha things should have a princess-- a princess who gets actualized through violence-- princesses? Mechas? There was a problem. I was having a problem.

--The problem was that I was out of bath bombs. I made an order of bath bombs and fancy soap from Lush, which I was recommended by the people on my useless bsky account that I never post in, except to ask about bath bombs once and also give updates on-- who cares what. I got a bit of sticker shock from Lush. I was so used to 1 dollar a serving bath bombs from amazon that are probably slowly killing me with syndromes you won't know exist until 20 years from now. But Lush's bath bombs are actually really good. They are big and super luscious and smell good and make your skin feel amazing. The color in the water is incredibly rich. I hate bath bombs that make the water like, "Poolrooms" blue. I want to bathe like I'm in video game colored water that kills you if you touch it. The soaps are also pretty good. Fancy bath stuff is my guilty pleasure. I'll still get the workaday trash bath bombs because I am not made of money. But just like my yankee candle candles, sometimes you just have to spend some money on a brand to get a thing that makes you feel good. For some people that's burgers. For me that's disposable and burnable lifestyle items.

I baked so many breads the past two weeks, while forgetting something I was supposed to do. I baked several homemade pizzas. I baked foccacia. I made cottage cheese pancakes (they have a batter! that's bread innit!). I started eating comparatively good, compared to how garbage I was eating before. I got dumbbells and a yoga mat so I could do the exercises that I liked to do when I lived with my parents and had only a small room in which to do things in without being criticized by my parents. The exercises I liked to do when I was young and reading things like "Kurokami," "Immortal Regis," and even complete irredeemable garbage like "Freezing." While I was lifting weights, thinking about how I was getting old and out of shape and should start easy so I don't break something-- I remembered like a thunderbolt from the sky. I remembered that-- I really liked the 2007 Wii hood classic "Endless Ocean" despite my thalassophobia-- but I didn't play it--

Anyway, I haven't been writing the past several weeks. I did outline an Unjust Depths chapter, because I got a really good idea one time. I wrote five outlines for the next chapter of Emptiness Effigied and I don't know how I feel about any of them. I don't know how I feel about anything lately. It feels pointless to do any of this. It is as pointlessly indulgent for me to waste time writing as it is to waste time reading god awful manga or playing power fantasy video games. Once upon a time I felt that it was important for me to write. That it was valuable for me to do so. I have been feeling less and less like that is the case. But you know what? That mess up there that probably annoyed you to read, was *really* fun for me. So right now, I'm just going to do me.

I don't know when the "soon" is anymore for the "coming soon" of Emptiness Effigied. I have a lot of things to think about.

If you're one of the dozen people who care, I don't know what you can do. Telling me you care will not do anything. Maybe forgetting about me would be the best course of action.

Until, 19 years later, you remember being 16, and reading "The Solstice War" which had a woman author of all things, who writes and enjoys unsavory pornography and is a stupid weirdo-- or something like that. Bookends. Real life just doesn't have 'em.