Hello.
Welp, this year didn't go exactly as planned. Life decided to kick us in the face, over and over and over and...
Anyway, our next series is not abandoned, just in the back burner for a bit. Need to regain the will to wake up every morning first. But as Citlalin mentions below, we managed to squeeze one more project before the year wraps up.
Funny story, when I bought the Even the Stars are gone, this little book came along for some reason, so we decided to work on it as it was fluff, and god knows we needed fluff in our lives. Turns out it was a sorta wrap up to a larger saga by Kino, but it also works as a post-Rebellion story so, yeah.
I just hope Kaiten can end on a similar note (unrelated, but I miss MagiReco so much ;_;), here's hoping. Now, let's hear some words from our resident blogposter.
Hello again everyone, buenos días, quēmmach huel amehhuāntin, nicītlalin. It's certainly been a year, hasn't it? I hope everyone is safe and happy, or doing as well as they can in these times. I feel like we (or I) say something like this at the beginning of every blog post around the new year, but what can I say, every year really feels like one of those years nowadays. 突然ですが I've been thinking I want to go see the ocean, or some large body of water. I'm not really sure why. I have seen oceans and big lakes before, but always from a distance, never up close. I've never walked right up along the shore of the ocean. I feel like maybe it's something I should do in this life. Maybe so I can come back and say 今日、海を見た。もう怖くない。 The Great Lakes are basically like the ocean right? Will walking out onto the ice fix me?
So as you may have noticed as an avid follower of our humble group, it's been a while since our last post, in which we very optimistically assured you all that further developments and releases were in the works. Things haven't gone entirely to plan but we did at least manage to crank this one out this year. We might end up working on a slightly more ambitious project after this one, so stay tuned.
This year has been a lot for us all. The things out of my control this year have been... decidedly bad, but the things under my control I think have surprisingly not turned out too badly, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about the coming year, probably for no good reason tbh. Sometimes the synapses just be firing in a certain way.
As always, thoughts on books and things to pad out this blog post:
Yes, And So Our Hollow Hearts Called For Love https://mismatched-wings.itch.io/hollow-hearts -- beautiful short vn I read as part of the menhera vn jam. Great character writing, some really inspired art, and a fascinating setting. Fans of PMMM I think will enjoy this one.
Dusk-Bound for Something Beyond https://snixiy.itch.io/dusk-bound-for-something-beyond -- another gem of a short vn from the same jam as the one above. Horrifying but also filled with human warmth. Bleak but because of that also incredibly tender. Beautifully written. Es is just like me fr fr.
Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology -- read this one cause I was feeling like I needed up to brush up on just the basics of autosegmental phonology to read more about tone but ended up learning way more about like the genealogy of ideas in the theory of phonology. The theories covered in this book I think are mostly if not entirely also covered in the Kenstowicz textbook but this book goes much more in depth into the theories it develops and apart from the first few chapters, is more of an exercise in plotting the development of AM phonology than a "textbook" aimed at learners, though it can certainly be used that way. This was supposed to be my year of Optimality Theory like I said in my last blog post but I ended up just going further down the rabbit hole of SPE style approaches as I'll touch on later... Maybe next year I'll study OT properly...
Shimeji Simulation -- almost a perfect 10/10 on every criteria for me. Cried reading the final volume. Pure kino. Kinísimo. I think I still prefer Girls' Last Tour's setting and overall vibe somewhat to Shimeji, but it's so exciting to see tkmz tackling something different while feeling like they're still carrying the DNA of what made GLT so great. The use of panelling in particular was incredibly inspired and clearly a step up from GLT and (please do not roast me for saying this) often feels like of Calvin and Hobbes in its mature stage in how free form its panneling can be and how it lets its art sometimes burst out of the panels' confines to show its characters' imaginations literally escaping the dimensions of their world.
Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness -- timely and incredibly incisive reappraisal of the sort of dominant interpretation of Nāgārjuna's work in the current Buddhist- analytical philosophy syncretism space, as first and foremost a religious thinker. Ironically as the author goes to pains to show again and again, for all the talk of trying to take Nāgārjuna at his word when he claims to embrace contradiction, almost all of the philosophical interpretations of his work have taken the task of philosophizing away the contradictions in his claims through parameterization of one kind of another as their main aim. The one negative thing I will say about this book is that it's written in an extremely abstruse style that makes its already complicated argumentation just incredibly hard to read for no good reason. If I ever have to read the phrase "eisegetic catachresis" again I think I'll just evaporate in a cloud of smoke.
水草物語 by 麦牛乳 -- Weird but also delightful little doujin manga I picked up on a whim. Made me remember my early childhood which is something I haven't done in a while. Mixed feelings on that experience tbh but the book itself was very good. Eagerly awaiting the next volume.
Introduction to Element Theory -- Very "smooth" introduction to a theory of phonology that almost feels too elegant to be real. Manages to capture so many phonological generalizations in a purely formal way that other theories often have to resort to phonetic explanations for. That said, it is like an "intro to ~" that picks all the strongest evidence and cleanest arguments for its theory, and as we see in other approaches that go even further in radically minimalizing the set of phonological primes like RCVP, what complexity you eliminate in the set of features you often just end up paying for with a more and more articulated structural representation of the "phoneme", though not being like a working phonologician or w/e who am I to say what the theoretically parsimonious balance of primes and structure is?
Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind Manga -- read this over the summer. Ever since a few years ago, every time the peak of summer has rolled around, I've always found myself overcome with a strange urge to read or watch post-apocalyptic media. Something about living in our slow motion car crash pre-apocalypse I guess. It's not really possible, or responsible I suppose, to recommend this manga to people who enjoyed the movie Nausicäa -- speaking as someone who grew up with the movie -- not just because of how different the two are, but because recommendation aimed at "enjoyers" of one piece of media carry the implicit assumption that the recommended piece of media can likewise be enjoyed in a similar way, and I just don't think the Nausicäa manga is a manga one reads to enjoy. For one thing, it's just not paced very well and is incredibly mucho texto, with lots of meandering plotlines that while adding a lot of depth to the world also feel like they just go on for too long. But pacing issues aside, the manga is simply just very bleak in contrast to the movie, and this is where I think the value in reading it is. The movie I think for better or worse, is a nice little fairytale about living in harmony with nature. The manga's thesis I think is much bleaker, and more radical.
And without further ado, the link.
