[intense ethereal whooshing] @algernoninwonderland - Tumblr Blog

I finally read Nabokov’s fan-poem about Superman being sad that he can’t actually bang Lois because he would kill her if he came inside her, and yeah, I sort of get why the New Yorker rejected it.

(Now to be fair it’s pretty funny, almost proto-Watchmen in its concerns)

#vladimir nabokov #nabokov #superman #nabokov was not a Batman guy #literature

Ralsei’s shaky identity and self-imposed selflessness translate musically too.

By which I mean: Is there a clear Ralsei theme?

(Likewise, is there a clear Kris theme? Well, they’re much too secretive to make it available on any chapter’s tracklist)

#utdr #deltarune #ralsei #kris dreemurr

Pilot!Cooper is so much more sinister, so much more febrile and manic than he appears throughout the rest of the show’s original run. If you were to move straight to the next episode right after you’re finished with the pilot, you’d be forgiven for thinking these are two very different characters.

Perhaps a good night’s rest at the Great Northern (and, more pragmatically, the developments from that pilot to the show proper in the months that followed it) truly changed our Special Agent that much, huh? (Though he isn’t wholly static character in the pilot either.)

#twin peaks #david lynch #mark frost #special agent dale cooper #kyle maclachlan #tp #blue velvet

If you live in the U.S. (or have a VPN), Speed Racer (2008) is available for free with ads on YouTube dot com right here, in 4K:

It’s a good fucking movie. You should watch it, or rewatch it.

#speed racer #the wachowskis #Youtube

Wow, the Hank Green news… Real loser shit, huh?

#if you’re a science communicator you’re meant to be credible #don’t use the shitty hallucination plagiarism machine that wastes water and power #especially not for research #something it is famously shit at doing #it’s really that simple #hank green

Donna takes the sweater Laura dropped in the Pink Room, which is the moment things get more physical between her and Tommy, and really, this is just her emulating her best friend, same with her drinking earlier on. Laura is horrified, drops everything to get her friend out of this place, out of trouble. “Don’t ever wear my stuff! Never! Donna, not you!” and of course it’s more than a matter of clothes, the film spells it out a few minutes later just in case it wasn’t clear enough.

Only later, just a few days later, Donna puts on Laura’s sunglasses and tries smoking, just like her. This time, there’s no one to stop her, she gets a few comments at most, it’s almost endearing, kind of goofy, very much what a teenager would do. Oh, and then Donna nearly dies to the same hands that killed her best friend.

I don’t know, there’s something to be said about that pattern of channeling Laura through what she wore, and, if you take the Secret Diary into account (which FWWM certainly does), about Donna wanting to follow Laura to places she really shouldn’t go, not because she wants to see and do these things, at least not only, but because (and this is the main reason) this is where Laura is.

#lauradonna #laura palmer #donna hayward #twin peaks #fire walk with me #twin peaks fwwm #tp #James is just a way to get closer to laura #just like mike was a way to get closer to laura #well not ‘just’ but ‘also’ leaning towards ‘mostly’

Having rewatched both the Blue Rose Extended and Q2 fan edits as well as the original theatrical cut, it’s obvious Mary Sweeney and Lynch made the right call in leaving out most of the Missing Pieces (at least beyond the Deer Meadow and Philip plotlines, the Buenos Aires stuff is just, wow). They’re all varying degrees of good to truly excellent, but keeping it all wouldn’t have worked.

All of these experiences are great (I like Blue Rose better than Q2), but the original FWWM is so much more devastating than any subsequent edit.

Still, that one shot of Laura staring and smiling at the evil ceiling fan should have been kept in.

#fwwm #twin peaks #seriously “’the shit it come out of my ass’ is an incredible line #proto-dumbland #now rewatching the return

algernoninwonderland

Holy fucking cannoli the “Mother 1” EB romhack is out.

I remember people talking about it on starmen dot net back in the late aughts. It’s still hard to believe it’s finally out.

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Having now finished it, it’s truly an impressive achievement!

With that being said, would I recommend this romhack over the OG? For anyone not used to Old RPGs, it’s the ideal way to dip your toes into what MOTHER can be like.

It’s all very familiar and yet, different vibes from the original, the sense of scale in particular is quite different, the lovely SNES sprites and their poppy colours all are very much unlike the NES game (all while being very close to it, still!), all of it makes me reluctant to say that it is the definitive way to play MOTHER.

#earthbound beginnings #mother #mother series

If Noelle and Kris work as both Laura and Donna, is the closest James analogue Susie?? I know her forehead isn’t that big but still.

#twin peaks #deltarune #susie deltarune #kris dreemurr #noelle holiday #she’s sweet but she’s so dumb

Early 2000s VN about weird stuff happening in a small town in the middle of nowhere (New Hampshire).

#deltarune #higurashi no naku koro ni #deltarune chapter 5 spoilers #this is what the refrance #weird route #noelle holiday #i tried editing the og rena sprite #to make her more noelle #but i'm too lazy to commit #yes this comes with voice acting #r07 #utdr #it’s all very onikakushi

The thing about Kriselle is that they are both Laura Palmer and each other’s Donna if that makes any sense.

That part of the Secret Diary, the entry for July 22, 1988 (that’s page 147 in the original hardback edition)….

I am not side by side with Donna Hayward. Something has happened to us, we grew up, together, but then I suddenly grew apart from her… certain events aged me, made me bitter.

It’s not a perfect 1 to 1, what these two have, and thank goodness for that, but there’s so much that echoes.

#kriselle #noelle holiday #kris dreemurr #deltarune #the secret diary of laura palmer #twin peaks

If you’re in the U.S. or have a VPN, Adult Swim is slowly putting all of Venture Bros out on YouTube.

I can’t emphasise how great of a show it is, and how consistently better it gets as it goes, how it builds on so much of what it sets up without you noticing. It’s so playful with its referentiality, and there’s always something new to catch when you revisit it. It does generational trauma just right. The way it handles nostalgia is so clever it still feels fresh.

One of the funniest, smartest, most moving shows I’ve ever watched, my favourite Adult Swim show bar none. If you loved Lupin the Third, this is right up your alley.

(The first handful of seasons are unfortunately a bit dated in some ways, some iffy jokes and questionable language, but if you can move past it (and I think it’s absolutely understandable if you can’t or won’t), you’re in for something really special.)

#go team venture #venture bros

algernoninwonderland

Hometown has a very vibes-based, evocative geography, seemingly following in the footsteps of MOTHER and EarthBound… But not quite.

Sure you’re reminded of Twoson (with the fall foliage palette from the Halloween Hack). Toriel’s house is at the top of the map, as is Ness’s in Onett. Police sawhorses are blocking the roads. The architecture seems like generic Americana rather than a specific place (unless you’ve decided that Deltarune takes place in New Hampshire, which it totally does, and I can prove it, I swear).

Just like in most top down 2D games, you get plenty of buildings that shouldn’t exist at this scale if at all, considering the size of the town, and yet it makes perfect sense that they’re here within the storyworld.

Only, Deltarune does things a little differently from the MOTHER games, and the end results are striking.

Whereas you need your hospitals to fix your status ailments, buy your mushrooms or resurrect a party member in EB, Deltarune’s hospital is here purely for storytelling purposes. Kris’s status ailments cannot be expressed through a menu system, or fixed by having a cup of hot cocoa (which does not restore their HP). Hometown is a walking simulator. And the space you’re walking through is different from EB’s towns, too.

While MOTHER and EB display very large maps (let’s call them rooms), often a single screen for an entire location, Deltarune doesn’t do that. If you try to stitch together the different rooms, there’s a lot that appears to be missing, bits and pieces not quite lining up. It wasn’t the case in Undertale. Hometown is aesthetically cohesive, but spatially fragmented. Is it because of the way GameMaker works? A deliberate design choice?

What you end up having is a very story-dense space that has no filler, but is not fully linear as a result, as though entire streets had been skipped. The Light World is supposedly the “real world” and yet Hometown is a sort of dream-town à la Twin Peaks.

algernoninwonderland

Now let’s take this further with chapter 5.

From a purely technical standpoint, nothing in DR exists beyond Hometown (and its Dark Worlds).

There are no sprite sheets for the roads leading out of Hometown, no names are given for any other locations, not even the name of Asriel’s college.

The police sawhorses are a permanent fixture you can’t skip past once you’ve beaten up the chief of police, and this is decidedly unlike EarthBound.

You’re stuck here. Noelle feels it more than anyone, and she has every reason to feel that way. She is technically wholly correct!

So of course, being the Gamer that she is, she tries going out of bounds, and here, the tileset really reflects this reading. The lake’s waters become more and more abstract, no leaves or light reflections. Clearly you’re not supposed to be here.

(Where Twin Peaks —the town, the storyworld at large— is ultimately a relatively open space, where people drive long distances, cross borders, thanks to the magic of television, the dream-like qualities of Hometown’s geography ultimately lack this openness.)

#deltarune chapter 5 spoilers #utdr #dr chapter 5 #weird route #noelle holiday #twin peaks

algernoninwonderland

While Dess occupies a lot of the same roles Laura Palmer did (the Lost Girl, the Girl in Trouble with a darker, more self-destructive side), one of the things that make me reluctant to call her a Laura is that she is no Prom Queen.

Laura’s whole thing in her public life was presenting herself as the perfect girl that everybody liked (now scratching that veneer, things were a lot uglier than that) and she did so much to be liked, to be good.

A significant part of the Pilot is dedicated to people mourning Laura. Arguably the entire show is about reckoning with her death and the ripples it caused in Twin Peaks. Hell, 25 years later, it still brings back memories, the Return shows the cosmological, metaphysical consequences of her life and death.

Outside of the Holidays and the Dreemurrs, no one in Hometown appears to be still missing Dess. Compare her bedroom with her sister’s, or Asriel’s side of his and Kris’s room. She didn’t seem interested in being liked by as many people as possible. No awards to be seen.

It has been years, sure, but you’d think Hometown’s chatterboxes would mention Dess in passing, in some of their anecdotes. Would Carol be able to control what this many people say? I doubt it, really. It’s a sleepy town in which not much seems to be happening, so Dess should be a topic that comes up every then and again. But she isn’t.

In-universe, Dess simply isn’t someone most people like to gossip about, she wasn’t all that popular outside of a tiny circle (family and family friends) so it’s harder for people to project their desires onto her, and that makes her very unlike Laura.

algernoninwonderland

One year and a chapter later, and if you’ve read the Secret Diary, Noelle is definitely much more of a Laura.