Hi, I'm Denise! This blog is for my artworks and for updates about my websites, especially my shared review-blog-thing Staircase Spirit and my Pokémon fansite Copy Cat. Reblogs are over on No Egrets. You can also find me on Rigelatin and on Pillowfort.
For ArtFight 2025, I started a diptych of @voidpineapple and @fransu's characters, Polly and Yurei. I didn't quite complete them before the end of the event, so I took my time finishing later. They were both really fun to draw! :D
I've told this story to some friends already and it's only fair to tell it again to everybody - also so you know why I've been hard to find lately. And since apparently I'm too good at suspense for my own good, as one friend told me in near-tears - don't worry! It's a happy story!
One night, @ritabuuk and I were playing Quake 2 when we heard insistent meowing outside. There is a cat colony around here, so we didn't think much of it for a while. We thought more about it when the meowing didn't cease for two whole hours, and sounded decidedly desperate.
At about 4 am, we ventured out to find the source of the meowing. In a bucket next to an empty house we found a screaming kitten, attempting to claw up the too-tall walls of the bucket. Next to the screaming kitten there was its sibling, who unfortunately had already been dead for a while.
Given the situation (and the near-freezing temperatures), we decided to pick up the screaming kitten and see what could be done. The poor thing still had its eyes closed and the umbilical cord even. We rewarmed it and fed it the best we could. We constantly checked if the mother came back, but nothing. At this point our mission was to make it survive until the morning, even though neither of us had any experience in keeping cats, let alone tiny kittens. Failing that, our mission would be to at least let it die while warm, and not in a bucket screaming in the cold.
The tiny tiny kitten made it to the morning and we were able to bring it to a vet, who told us that
the kitten was max two days old, and, as we would learn later, possibly actually only a few hours old
the kitten was in good health, all considered. Quite strong.
We weren't given any options for any experts to surrender it to, but we were given a crash course and some materials for how to feed it and care for it in the meanwhile that we would find someone with a suitable nanny cat.
The following days were hectic. On top of needing to feed this kitten every two hours, I also had a minor surgery. When I got up from the operating table I literally ran back home to take care of the kitten, which I don't think is usual recovery procedure. At least there were two of us to take shifts, but we still had no experience in taking care of this kitten, so every moment we worried that it would die.
Yet the kitten ate copiously and was fine.
Although we still couldn't find anyone with a nanny cat or anyone able to take it off our hands at this stage. It'd have to be us raising it. I begrudged that quite a lot, because, hey, I just didn't want this kitten to die bad, I didn't want to turn around my whole life for it...
Anyway, we put together supplies for it. My mother also built a fluffy pillow and a plush mommy for the kitten's comfort; the kitten does adore the fluffy pillow, though it mostly likes to poop on the plush mommy. Well. Anything helps...
In time, the kitten grew to the size of a potato and opened its eyes. It also immediately proceeded to get an eye infection and a cold, which led us all to realize that it probably never received any milk from its mother, hence the lack of immunities, and that's why we realized it was even younger than we knew. We were all fooled by how lively and large it was even at birth, but it seems like it's just a combination of being a boy cat (large), a ginger cat (usually large), and just a potato in general (large potato).
My sister suggested to name it Curry. I objected in the beginning, but, okay, it is exactly the color of curry powder. And the white is like the rice. And it is certainly a spicy and powerful cat. Curry it is then. Curry the kitty. I tend to call it Curry Potato. When @ritabuuk scolds it, she calls it Tim like the actor. Full name Timothy Curry Potato. Besides, if you left it to me, I may have named it Quake 2, the game it interrupted, and nobody would have been happy about that.
It is a very cute kitten. Cute to the point of looking like an animatronic that is trying too hard to look cute.
And here I am with my cool image completely shattered:
Curry is now 26 days old, I believe. He has already has many teeth with which he bites a lot, though he doesn't yet fully understand meat. In spite of its difficult beginnings, he is surprisingly friendly, and isn't afraid of anything. He hesitates about exploring dark spots in the room, but eventually goes there and investigates them fully (ah! one of us!). He loves shoes and especially my beach sandals, which he requests to ride like a spaceship. He can enjoy that until he can, as he continues exceeding the expected size for his age every day, and so we suspect he will eventually grow to the size of a small puma.
Even though it wasn't our original intention, it looks like we'll be keeping Curry after all. I know that cats choose their people, and I fully expected that one of the colony cats would one day wander in our house and decide to stay, but I did not expect it would go like this. And even like this, I thought this kitten would like us just because we feed him, but even when he's fed and content he comes towards us for attention and purrs. Or I look inside the house and he immediately gives me the greeting head bonk. Dammit. I'm not the kind of person who gets attached, but he's attached to me, and I don't really know how to handle this...
Alright, okay. Curry the kitty can stay. Hello Curry the kitty. Let's go on adventures across the room.
I made a little AMV of the events of The Gifts of Darkness (chapters 19-22) set to the beginning of This Time Imperfect by AFI. I thought the lyrics were just too fitting for Adrien's dilemma and angst during this part of the story!
This is the first time I've made a pan-over-the-art style of video, so I probably have much to learn, but @devilrose's art is so gorgeous I feel like the result is automatically a success.
I’ve completed a new AMV! It features the depravity and downfall of Handsome Jack from the Borderlands series, set to Pretty Handsome Awkward by The Used.
Warnings for: bright flashes, eye trauma, and spoilers for Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and Tales from the Borderlands.
I also haven't really shared this AMV on Tumblr before, so here it is: Howl's Moving Castle set to Death of Seasons by A.F.I.
Please excuse the video quality, this is actually a test version that I rendered in 2013 right before my old computer died and took the project file with it. I learned my lesson, nowadays I have so many backups of things like this... backup backup backup!!!
Rosy asked me to share my Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland AMV, and she's right, I've never actually shared it with Tumblr before! Here's a version with hard subs, and the original (with soft subs) is available on our site.
I’ve finished a new AMV! It's about Dead Space and Isaac Clarke's struggle with guilt and grief — not to mention also alien-zombies, suicide-cultists, and mind-altering artifacts. The music is None Becoming by Dark Tranquillity (with subtitles for anyone not fully fluent in metal).
A blog for reblogging, showcasing, and cherishing long AMVs! They take so much effort to make, and they should be properly celebrated!
We feature any AMV over 1 minute long.
We take the term AMV in a pretty wide sense, and so we accept not just anime but also any kind of animation, live-action, and video games. Anything as long as it's a fandom project involving video with music.
If you have an AMV that qualifies, please send a submission!
We were seeing a recent thread going around about how some folks on the internet (or at least the platforms they are using) have become hostile toward longform AMVs. So, hey, let's try our best to counteract that bias! Sometimes an AMV just has to be gloriously long, and we want to enjoy and celebrate long AMVs too! Follow along to see some long AMVs, and please submit your favorites too!
When back in ~2017 we started writing a Staircase Spirit article about our thoughts and feelings about the tumultuous history of the girl protagonists from the Pokémon games, little did we know what dreadful can of worms we'd just opened.
Now, we're ready to share our findings in the form of our most studious fansite, which happens to be about a bunch of Pokémon girls who just can't get a break.
Who are they? What are their names? How many of them are there? Follow us on this journey in which we will not find answers to these questions. An abyssal dive through the history of the Pokémon fandom, of its canon... and its sins.
Hi, Denise here for a retrospective look at the articles Rosy and I shared on Staircase Spirit during 2025, and to look ahead a bit at 2026!
Detective Conan Anime Reviews
We started the year off with a big article covering the chunk of episodes including the big introduction of Haibara! This was a lot to discuss in this set, from trying to explain how this introduction was confusingly handled in the anime, to coalescing our thoughts about the early appearances of this beloved character.
(for some reason Tumblr isn't doing the link preview for this one right, and I can't figure out why, so excuse my hacky compromise, lol)
Part 9 of our Detective Conan anime reviews: The introduction of Haibara!!
This was a big one! Afterwards, we didn't do any other Detective Conan articles in 2025, but we've already released the first of 2026.
Pokémon Movie Reviews
Next in 2025, we dove into covering the next two Pokemon movies in our series, the one with Victini and the one with Keldeo.
In Pokemon Movie 14 or The Victini Movie, we meet characters-of-the-day Juanita, Carlita, and DREAD as we endure dual movie shenanigans!
Pokemon Movie 15 or The Keldeo Movie is a simple, formulaic, unambitious coming-of-age story that nevertheless achieves its goals. The bar i
We're still not sure which of these two movies we'd say are better or worse than the other: one had some extremely ambitious ideas that we say ultimately failed and resulted in weird and boring movie(s) - but it at least convinced us that Victini is cute - while the other was extremely unambitious and we guess succeeded at what it tried to do, but ultimately that wasn't a whole lot - and we still don't really care that much about Keldeo.
The next Pokémon movie in series would be...... oh no... uh, how about we switch gears for awhile and, uh, let's talk about...
The Elder Scrolls
We played The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, and we wanted to share how we managed to do that, and everything we loved and hated about this wonderful, terrible game.
The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard is simultaneously one of the best and the worst games we've played.
We also once again turned our attention to Oblivion and wrote our thoughts about the Dark Brotherhood questline, in two parts.
Dark humor abounds… but also lots of serious discussion about the Themes. This is our favorite part of the Dark Brotherhood questline.
The second part of the Dark Brotherhood questline, everything from after the Purification to the end.
Copy Cat
In between things, I also did a super major overhaul to the "How to Catch Mewtwo" page on Copy Cat. It has gone from a relatively short page to an in-depth discussion of Mewtwo with regard to game design and dark patterns, in-universe and out-of-universe theories, and with a particular spotlight on Shiny Mewtwo. Every time I thought I was done with updating this page, I realized there was something else big I wanted to talk about -- and that happened like six times before it was finally done.
A retrospective look at Mewtwo's role in the context of each generation, with plenty of my personal opinions regarding game design, canon, a
Along the way, I also spun-off a discussion about Mewtwo in Pokemon GO.
Mewtwo has been a prominent figure in Pokémon GO as a powerful enemy and a sought-after ally, spotlit for celebrations and promotional event
We hope you've enjoyed what we did in 2025 and look forward to what we've got coming in 2026! :D
Continuing our Detective Conan anime reviews, we wrote about the third movie, The Last Wizard of the Century, the first one with Kaito Kid.
We thought the plot was too fragmented, and also we're not great fans of Kaito Kid, so we're aware we're not the target audience. But the animation is so, so, so, stunning, we think it's worth it anyway.
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