Today’s deck is the Medieval Mischief Tarot.
I thought the deck was going to be like… medieval silliness and stuff, but it’s actually more of an ideosyncratic deck with the Marseilles deck as a basis. It also has symbols for the planets and whatnot associated with each card, but my eyes tend to glaze over whenever a deck adds that sort of symbol in the card.
Today’s reading advises to look inwards in the road to improvement (of the craft variety).
Speaking of which, I wonder if my readings being shorter on the regular nowadays is a sign of improvement or of neglect…
I woke up SO disoriented, dude.
First I see the clock says 11:00, so I get out of bed, then I see it’s night so it’s actually 11PM and I think “holy fuck I slept like 20 hours”… then I actually wake up proper and remember I went to sleep at like 4PM.
It’s not the first time that has happened either, it’s happened at least 4 times since I moved to Japan (not counting today) and a special mention goes to one time when it happened in a weekend where I had to go to school on a Saturday for some event prep and I was so jumpy about it that I was already dressing up before noticing it was 2AM… and then my mom admonished me because she saw my room’s lights on at 2AM when I should’ve been sleeping.
Finally awake, I start my daily routine including showering and OH RIGHT THE SHOWERHEAD BROKE BETTER REPLACE IT.
And this, is today’s Big Adventure.
So here’s the dilemma: The showerhead broke at its base, meaning there’s very little surface to grab, I also had one of those things that are like pliers for tightening pipes, but it was too wide to grab onto the base of the hose.
I thought maybe warming the part up would loosen it, but how? If I turned on the hot water I would just make the slippery surface more so… so I had the brilliant idea of putting a lighter onto the plastic.
Not only did the plastic barely warm or bubble up, I literally made the lighter run out of fuel in the process.
At this point, I decided to take my brain off it and started playing a new game called The Censorer.
It’s made by the author of NTR Holic and rather than all the release bugs it has and the odd design choice here and there, the one detail I wanna talk about is how… odd the tone is.
NTR stories are supposed to have a mean streak to them, to either revel in the catharsis of corruption, or in the angst of the betrayal. NTR Holic and this game share this very specific point where it has all the tells of a power fantasy but the feeling is more of… how to explain it…
It feels less like “I’m gonna steal this dude’s girl” and more like “this girl should’ve been mine to begin with”.
“Gee Fer, that sure is a well-articulated criticism for someone that’s not into NTR” Shuddup.
To be into NTR means to be fundamentally into the cuckolded position, and if what I’m into is either a guy stealing a chick, or a girl getting a guy that’s not a herbivore, then I’m not really into NTR because I can get that from elsewhere.
The game isn’t bad, but it’s the kind where I played for five hours because I was at a loss on what to do and how to progress.
After those five hours I went back to the showerhead dilemma and I’ll spare you the extra two hours or so of unga and, for good measure, bunga; and instead skip to what I ended up doing.
In my desperation combing my apartment for solutions, I found a box of rubber bands and felt like it was sent from the heavens.
I wrapped a gazillion rubber bands into the hose base, which gave it volume and grip that the pipe tightener thingo could hold it.
That in one hand, pliers in the other, boom. Separated.
I felt like a genius for coming up with the rubber band idea until I remembered the lighter stuff, and the hammering, and the inneffective twisting, and an attempt to un-screw it with a flat screwdriver.
In hindsight, I’m SHOCKED the showerhead broke at all, what the fuck.
But I was finally able to shower and man, I had forgotten what a showerhead with good pressure felt like at home.
After the shower I started reading some erotica novels I have around (think the kind that’s near the porn comic compilations in bookstores) to get some reference (some of you might remember I mentioned a couple of days I’ve been feeling the drive to write smut for fun) and the results of actually paying attention to things instead of just skimming through it all are… interesting.
I will preface this by explaining that what I’m about to say isn’t to say what I read was bad, or that what I’m going to describe is bad, there might a valid point or two, but in the end this is me as a creative articulating what I took away from it in the context of using the material as reference.
With that said… a lot of the core of that erotica ends up relying on “girl hot” and not much more. The sort of prose where the core of the matter is describing the girl, where even in the most active scenarios the excitement is more from describing how soft the girl’s boobs were, and how soft they felt around your penis while she talks kinda dirty to you.
And to illustrate my point, as I was mentally digesting all the stuff that I read, the mush of prose and whatnot felt a very specific way in my mind…
Bodily descriptions, over and over, emphasizing how impressive what’s described is…
Like, if we were talking about penises you’d have the guy be like “it gets bigger when I pull it” or “sometimes I pull it so hard I rip the skin”.
Now, this approach to prose isn’t bad. It’s just as valid as any other, and if having an OnlyFans inbox being constantly spammed and bombarded by girls I long since unsubscribed by has taught me anything is that 20-something thots are insufferable for some “my tits are so big, don’t you wanna lick them?” is enough to get them going.
Hell, it’s enough to get ME going, the same prose that I’m criticizing is the kind that thrives in stuff like ASMR, but therein lies the first problem, I feel: It’s not something that feels exclusive to a novel.
As I read many of the passages, one thought that crossed my mind was “What does this acomplish that an illustration can’t?” or “I’d have more fun with this being an ASMR thing”, and it’s not from me being dismissive of the writing but rather the fact that it didn’t have anything that felt… exclusive to a novel.
But the best way to sum it up is that the biggest appeal of written word is how unconstrained from the workload of visuals or even the need for snappiness of motion media, and yet you don’t feel that “yeah, illustrating/animating this bit would’ve been a chore” at any point.
You know how some Visual Novels have the problem that they were clearly meant to be novels and the game seems to treat the visual element as an afterthought? It’s like the polar inverse of that.
Here’s the most simple of examples I can think of off the top of my head: Let’s say you’re writing a scene where you’re making out with a girl you’ve described plenty of times as thin and fragile. You can use all the poetic language comparing her to flower petals, or rice paper, or whatever else you want… but what if instead you describe that when you hugged her, skin to skin touching, you could feel her ribcage; that you were worried about hugging too hard because you were very aware of everything within her moved with every breath, and how warm she kept getting despite the small frame.
Another more common example is describing minute gestures that might be too complicated or clumsy to convey in other mediums. The main example that comes to mind is how tongue-kissing tends to be portrayed via tongues intertwinning in the open to make the idea clear when you’re not an illustration that an afford an Xray cut-through of the action. With written word not only can you do that but you can even be very specific like talking about feeling the other person’s mouth cieling for example.
That’s the sort of touchy feeling and emotion you can only convey through words, the sort of thing that you make with no concern for how to depict it visually that always results in some really inspired adaptation choices… or a copout via narrator or omission.
Incidentally, the use of that sort of prose ENHANCED by visuals is when Visual Novels truly shine.
Another detail I noticed in that specific bubble of erotica I binged is that things are very… static. There’s always one side taking the lead with the other reacting rather than being a more reciprocal situation.
“Fer, what you want is female-oriented porn”. Yes, and no…
Like with my own sense of gender where I consider myself a man with a brain wired like a woman’s (but not necessarily a woman trapped in a man’s body), what I want is the sort of dynamics that female-oriented porn offers but remaining within the fetishes and aesthetics of male-oriented porn. And like with all the creative stuff I do, the fact that I’ve identified my own underserved niche is what fuels me into wanting to make something.
…
…you know, I take it for granted and I even forget about it, but I AM a professional in this whole writing thing, huh…