This is one of my absolute favorite animes. Vampires take over a small village over the space of a hot, humid summer. That’s really it—but Shiki makes the most of it from every angle, using a large cast of characters to explore just what this strange summer cold killing everyone off slowly really means to everyone: the girl who couldn’t wait to finally get out of the backwards little village and escape to the big city; the woman who never had a family and finally found one—only to be taken away from it; the surly teen dragged here by his idealistic parents who only just started to make friends, only to see them all start to disappear; the weird monk who has lavender hair.
Art direction wise, this is very stylized, which I think works against it, and the only thing I can’t really be super enthusiastic about. The art style is based on the manga, though the original story comes from a novel, and this is where the story gets its robustness, and where the style and story seem to misaligned, at least for me anyway. This is not to say that more stylized art usually for younger audiences can’t have complexity, but this is a much more robust story than the cover, or any screencaps, will ever convey.
the hair in this anime is truly insane. there’s no earthly explanation for any of this
Because it is based on a novel, it lacks the typical episodic feeling of animes based on manga, and this isn’t to say that it’s better for this, it’s just different. Slightly more compelling, though, maybe. A novel has a better chance of developing inferiority—and therefore some level of complexity—with its characters than visual media, and that manages to come across with what ends up on screen in Shiki.
It has an unbelievable soundtrack as well. Eerie, mournful, gorgeous, great writing music. And it has an ending that remains one of the few endings of anime, tv, movies, whatever, that really stuck with me.
Where you can watch it fluctuates a lot, but as of March 2024 it’s on Crunchyroll at least. Make sure to watch with subs if you can. It really is an unforgettable horror anime.
Oh yeah… there’s a catboy in this. Yeah, it is weird that I have two nickels for “favorite vampire animes that have catboys in them for some reason”
(There is a wealth of info about the combat in the game, but nothing beyond that.)
This is not a real death card–I made it in photoshop–but it is what my friends and I were saying non-stop when my friend Rob streamed the game for us a few months back.
THE SHORT OF IT
I waffled on rating this a lot, and while I hate the idea of decimals in a “out of 10” rating, I have to settle on giving it a 7.5/10. 7 was too low, 8 suggested more perfection than is found in the game. But I stand by a 7.5—it’s a score that reflects its flaws and its strengths.
Cause, I’ll be honest, this game hooked me. It’s really, really fun to play, and I think anyone who deeply loves the combat of soulsborne titles will likely love it, too. If you play these games for the lore, however, look elsewhere.
Lies of P has a lot of quality of life features that make it a hair more accessible than proper Fromsoft titles, but the difficulty is still there. I found it on par with Dark Souls 3, which for me has a low, but still satisfying, level of difficultly up until a certain point. The introduction of a perfect parry system gives the fast-paced, Bloodborne-style combat a new edge, and this, paired with a skill tree, the ability to customize weapons, and the lying mechanic in the story part of the game provides players with a huge variety of builds and play styles to try out.
Veteran souls players might find the levels slightly too short, but the level design is well done, as is enemy and boss variation. The setting is a new one—it is not a copy of Bloodborne, and excels most when it’s doing its own thing instead of looking to Fromsoft titles for inspiration. A good soundtrack and diegetic sound and music throughout levels give it a more warm feel than some Fromsoft titles, which is apt for the theme of the game. The story is easy to understand and engage with (a pro to some, a con to others), and quests are not nearly as difficult as those in the Dark Souls series or Elden Ring. Newcomers to soulslike games and veterans alike will find it as rewarding, complicated and satisfying as any soulsborne game.
Its only large flaws are the lack of the weird, the creepy, the fucked up horny and pure masochistic spirit of a true Fromsoft title. The story, its themes, the designs and the writing are all very straightforward, and it would’ve been much better (a masterpiece, if I dare say it) if it let itself get weird and dark and embrace the full potential of wrestling with ideas of humanity through puppets (and the perfect canvas they are for body horror) but again, the combat is so solid that the more shallow writing doesn’t bother me as much as it would if the game wasn’t as much fun to play as it is.
Lies of P is a solid game following the formula of a soulslike very faithfully while developing its own identity and flavor within that framework. It’s hooked me completely, and I’d say it’s worth the full price tag, given its immense replayability, even if it is a little on the short side. I had a great time with my first play through of the game, and I’m already delightedly dreaming up the many builds I’ll use to get that Platinum trophy. (I’m also very interested in their next game, but I won’t spoil what that is—you’ll have to play Lies of P yourself to see what IP they’re doing next.)
I’ve played the whole game with this “clown nose” on (it’s actually a reindeer nose from a holiday event?? i think?)
OKAY, HERE’S THE BIG LONG REVIEW
To get the first thing out of the way, a lot of this game was really funny because I have what uncharitable people call an “immature sense of humor”. Lies of P on its own is a really funny name. The skill tree leveling system is called the P-organ, and leveling up this skill tree is called “activating your P-organ”. It’s just pure comedy for a guy who played the game entirely in a clown nose and took photos of every toilet they found in the game and shared them in the gamer group chat.
(Yes, everyone enjoyed the toilet photos. And if you were wondering how many toilets are in Lies of P, there are only three. Can you flush them? No. For this, it gets a 6/10 on the toilet score, and Phasmophobia, with its many flushable toilets, reigns supreme.)
The premise of the game alone was also quite funny—why the fuck would you put a puppet based on Pinocchio of all characters in a grim, dark and dim soulsborne-like world? It kept striking me as weird—weird and funny, especially with the game trying its best to incorporate as much as it could from the original story. Levels that reminded me strongly of something from Dark Souls 3 were especially bizarre, because it felt like kinda Dark Soulsy, but… everything in it was an evil puppet? Just a bunch of puppets. It was so bizarrely entertaining. I absolutely loved it.
And well—I suppose the real deep-down answer to this question of why the devs picked Pinocchio for the game is “because Pinocchio is out of copyright” but to be fair to them, as the game went along, I started to understand the why beyond that. And the answer is, basically, why the fuck not? Turns out, it whips total fucking ass to run around Belle Époque Europe as a small killing machine with a blade, a weaponized arm and a passion for lying.
Toilet #1. Scary due to the old-fashioned wooden seat. Never designed initially to be flushable, so maybe the toilet score for Lies of P should be higher. I will think about it.
Is it “Bloodborne 2” as some people were saying in early play testing? Not really—certainly not in theme, for while the influence is highly visible, Lies of P is not a horror game (but more on that later), and while the combat is very similar to Bloodborne with its heavy melee focus, quick attack patterns and the ability to roll and strafe, it introduces a Sekiro-style parry system which broadens the play style considerably, making dodging and getting perfect parries both viable ways to deal with incoming attacks.
The perfect parries were not the way I played the game, as I’m really bad at parrying because I struggle with reaction times. But the idea is fantastic: block at just the right moment, and you block 100% of the incoming damage, as well as build up that invisible stagger bar and have a chance to break a boss’s weapon. If you weren’t perfect with your block timing, you only take some of the damage and can then rally back the health lost.
This ability to rally back health lost during an unsuccessful parry is brilliant, as it encourages players to learn the timings for perfect parries since the risk is so much less than missing a parry in any Fromsoft game (barring Sekiro, maybe? I don’t know). This is by far the smartest thing the game does combat-wise, and one of the small quality of life things scattered throughout the game that make it just slightly (by a hair or two) more accessible than actual soulsborne games.
Another more accessible addition to the soulsborne combat formula is that the game lets you know when you need to get one more charged attack on an enemy to cause a stagger. Their health bar starts flashing white, and that’s your signal to really rush in—however, this can cause an absolute mad frenzy to become reckless trying to get a stagger off. You just might die from this, multiple times, until you learn your lesson to just calm the fuck down.
The Legion Arm (that’s your mechanized left arm weapon) is a fun addition to the Bloodborne-style combat, and I’d probably have more to say about it if I’d played Sekiro. It’s not as usable as a gun in Bloodborne, or spells/miracles/etc in any of the magically inclined games, so a “Legion Arm only” build isn’t viable—you will be doing melee in this game. But it can help out in a pinch by adding some extra ranged physical or elemental damage, some blocking capabilities—or just give you a very cool “puppet string” ability, which can whip you up into the air and land really sick looking aerial attacks if you upgrade the Puppet String arm all the way.
Toilet #2. An old fashioned, high tank toilet, which means this sucker would really flush–if only it could.
And that brings me to something else—the combat in this game is flashier than in soulsborne games, giving us what I would affectionately call a good dose of “anime bullshit”. Cool flips and spins, sound and visual effects when landing fatal attacks, and big beautiful arcs of… black grease. Because you’re mainly fighting puppets and they’re full of oil, not blood. It still looks as cool as blood, though, I promise, and feels just as satisfying.
The exact anime bullshit you end up with is determined by the Fable Art on your weapon. Think Weapon Art from DS3 or Ash of War from ER and you’re on the right track. They come from the handle and the blade itself, some better than others, and you can build up Fable with attacks (mostly charged attacks, I think) or use consumables or perks in the skill tree to get more Fable.
This game doesn’t have transforming weapons like Bloodborne, but it has something just as cool: the ability to swap blades and handles between almost any weapon in the game. Match the damage types and make sure you’ve got the right crank on the handle for your build and you’re good to go. This customization increases the game’s replayability tenfold and helps the player pick a weapon with a move set that suits them, which, just like the anime bullshit, arcs of black grease, and a rare moment (for me) of actually landing a perfect parry makes the combat intensely satisfying.
This is Lies of P’s inarguable strength: it feels great to play. It also looks great to play. I’m not sure why most of the costumes in the game are in an 18th century style, predating the actual setting of the game by at least 100 years, but it does look sick as hell, so no points docked off from me. You can wear a frilly shirt and breeches as you run around the streets of Krat, and I love frilly 18th century shirts, so I’m pleased.
The levels themselves are overall smaller than in Fromsoft games, and do feature some of the winding layout and short-cut goodness we’re used to. However, the shortness made the shortcuts less awe-invoking. You know the feeling—you’re deep in the wynds of Yharnam, lost as all shit and going “dear god there has to be a lantern soon somewhere fucking please I’m almost dead I’m out of heals dear god please” and then… there’s a gate that opens up to the Central Yharnam lamp, and the sight of that damn thing fills you with joy and peace and relief.
Because the levels are shorter, I was rarely at that point of desperation. I found a shortcut and was like “okay, cool, well, that’s there for later I guess” and turned around to keep exploring. Often times the shortcuts felt completely unnecessary, like they were just there because “Fromsoft games have shortcuts”.
The final toilet, #3. Another old fashioned high tank, but the stall next to it had a guy in it that tried to kill me. Not ideal restroom experience.
The only level that seemed to really have the sprawling, infuriating, confusing and winding Fromsoft level design that we all love was the very last level—but that’s not the say I didn’t enjoy the others. Some levels in Lies of P take clear, unabashed inspiration from Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 and don’t hide it, and they do a good job at their version of it. (Then again—how can you really re-invent a city layout of this general era for this exact format of a game? To me, Krat did not feel much like Yharnam.)
The best levels, though, took nothing from other Fromsoft games and were entirely their own thing, chosen not because “Fromsoft usually does a level like this”, but because they were entirely relevant to the story of the game. I won’t spoil what they are, but these levels were beautiful, as was the use of atmospheric sound, and diegetic sound and music. The latter I absolutely loved for a feeling of verisimilitude—of course there would be sounds of life in Krat, even if there is a Puppet Frenzy slowly destroying all of it—and it could even be considered a quality of life thing to help less well-oriented players remember where things are on a level. It gave the world fantastic flavor, and I especially loved passing by a section of street that had someone playing a record inside. It’s little things like that that really made the game feel distinct, and gave it a touch that Fromsoft games don’t usually have (which is understandable, as many soulsborne games push the isolation and desolation to extreme degrees.)
This humanity, if you will, and touch of warmth to the setting here and there works extremely well with the theme of the game. We are, after all, a puppet turning into a human, on some level, through the mechanic of lying. I won’t spoil the story’s angle on why this happens, but the more you lie, the more your mechanical heart pounds, and the more human you become. I also won’t spoil what some of these more human details are, because I think they’re really fun to start noticing yourself as you play, but giving the playable character an actual arc in the narrative is something I am not used to in soulsborne games (again, I haven’t played Sekiro), and I loved it.
The story itself is not very complicated, nor is it super surprising or difficult to figure out, which is either a strength or a weakness. If you love soulsborne games for inscrutable, excruciatingly well written lore hidden in items, this is not the game for you. The benefit to the simpler story was that I understood it all, without any effort, and that made me more eager to engage with it every chance I got because 1) I knew why I was doing all of it, and 2) I knew what I was likely to get out of it & what its effects on me and the world would be. At no point in the game did I feel stressed out because I might fuck up an ending or a quest.
I have run out of toilet photos, so here is P in his “griffith era”, as I call the long silver hair look.
This brings into focus one of the biggest quality of life things in Lies of P: markers and icons show up for where you need to go and who you need to talk to for quest and story progression. It’s not as intense as a quest log, but levels will light up if there’s someone to talk to there, and when the story progresses, icons of characters will appear on their respective locations so you know you need to go talk to them. This was great as someone who experiences a very single-minded brain when it comes to video games. You see, when I’m in a game, I’m there to kill with my big cool weapon, and I am overridden with the bloodlust to kill and destroy with my big cool weapon. I think about the stuff in the game after I have played a session of it and am not overridden with the bloodlust that says I need to go back out there and kill and destroy with my big cool weapon.
So—it depends on the kind of player you are whether or not a simpler story with quest markers will be your jam or not. Undeniably the writing itself—as in the actual script for characters, item descriptions and level names—is not nearly anywhere as good as it is in Fromsoft games. The dialogue was clunky, and the item descriptions and tips on screen felt more like someone had written down the gist of what should be written about… but no one bothered to take those notes and turn them into something well written. Item names did not have the bone-shattering poetry of Bloodborne items, and level names failed to roll off the tongue (“Isabella Rosa Street” still bothers me), and while it might attempt to have some of the Fromsoft sprinkling of archaic English and Latin here and there, it fails to deliver any real obscurity. “Malum District” is all we really get, and it’s too easy and obvious; I took a quarter of Latin in college 17 years ago, and I got a D in it, and I know that “malum” just means ‘evil’.
(I realize that some of this is likely due to the translation & localization team, since I think Lies of P was made by a Korean dev team. The clunkiness is probably the result of more direct translations, which should’ve been fine-tuned and rewritten slightly to sound better in English. I’m not upset about it, but it is harder to stomach when compared to what the game is trying to emulate. I’m hoping they have a better team who will undertake this extra fine tuning for the next game.)
So, we have a story that is told all very much this straight-forward on-the-nose sort of way, and fails to deliver much in the way of poetry, subtlety, or elegance. This is in keeping with the overall art direction of the game, as well, which, apart from also being quite on the nose and straight-forward, fails on two main points: it forgets to design the monstrous with dignity, and it is not freaky fucky creepy horny at all. This, as a weird freaky horny person myself, is a pretty big whiff.
Speaking of whiffs… this happens. Don’t worry about it.
Every opportunity to make the game fucky and horny is missed, as are all the opportunities for body horror. This assessment of mine does imply that I think it should’ve been a true horror game—it is at most a “dark” game, but not horror, and a game about evil puppets and monstrosities and the nature of humanity could be seeping with horny, scary, weird shit, thriving and blooming in the embrace of horror.
Instead of going truly dark and weird, our finely tuned killing machine who sharpens his blade on his own mechanical arm is just a child puppet (who looks thoroughly human through the whole game), and the puppet enemies and bosses are just… kinda like, odd looking mannequins and machines. Odd is probably being generous—they’re a bit busted and grimy, but that’s it. There are a lot of handlebar mustaches as well, which are almost always funny. When monstrosities come in, they’re mainly just lumpy and a bit silly—cartoonish, even—and there’s no better example than the last mandatory boss, who looks like a big potato with arms and a head plonked on there—and then he gets a second phase with a weird glowing “god arm” slapped in there and a second head that looks like a slightly melting cock head. Not in a hot way, either. Or even a funny one… or whatever the hell is going on with Ludwig the Accursed’s blobby, pustule-ridden second mouth(?) in Bloodborne. It’s just like, a glowing cock head for some reason… it fails to disgust or excite me in any fashion.
Fromsoft always hits the nail on the head when it comes to dignity in the monstrous. Bloodborne taught me so much about design, truly, and it is not an exaggeration to say it changed me as an artist. The monsters and machines in Lies of P do not feel like the awe-invoking monstrosities they should be—filing you with an awe that is cognate to “awful”—be they emerging gods or saints, and the machines are not finely crafted killing machines gone wrong, horrible in their elegance and short-circuiting into a horrific capability for destruction that is fixed upon you—you, a small puppet, alone in a crumbling world with your fragile, waking humanity beating inside of you.
Instead they are just like… you know, they’re there. And you fight them. Almost all the bosses have cinematic intros, which I think are well done, and seem to be crafted with much care and pride, but the art direction and overall vibe of the game still lacks the special sauce that Miyazaki and his masochism bring to soulsborne games.
Because the masochism really does matter—you might rail against this and my desire for this game to be horny in this way (granted, I am single, and very bored)—but soulsborne games are games that kill you, over and over, and there is a delight in that. The player delights in this—that is the joyful, willing suffering of a fanbase dedicated, desiring and wanting to be destroyed over and over again. “This is how I want to be killed!” are Miyazaki’s own words regarding the brutality of the souls games. In Lies of P, there is no exquisite martyrdom, no desire to destroy the flesh—which could be woven in beautifully with the game’s theme of humanity, and the inherent ability of the player character, as a puppet, to be destroyed, repaired, and reconfigured.
So it is a disappointment that these things are missing in the game. The design that gives dignity to a monster or a machine gives them a veil of humanity, a relatability—they are as important, meaningful, beautiful and as real as I, the player character, am. They are not insignificant. The world is more than me—that is awe-striking, and awful. What is a puppet, a monster, and what is a human? The line is blurred a little in Lies of P, especially towards the end—but there is very little dignity given, visually, to what should be given dignity, and there is no joy in the masochism, or fear for the suffering and destruction—and death and destruction is something a puppet does not naturally fear, for he can be reassembled from spare parts so easily. So, shouldn’t the puppet of Geppetto fear his repeated death and destruction as he becomes more human? Shouldn’t he delight in the destruction as much as he fears it? Shouldn’t the fear be exquisite, as it is such a human thing for a puppet to feel? Does the masochism of Fromsoft games really have no place in this story?
Well, the developers didn’t think so—or it didn’t occur to them. Granted, there are many, many fans of soulsborne games that do not see, understand or appreciate these aspects of the games, and if you told them that this weird, horny, masochistic joy of destruction was a part of every game—even coming from the mouth of Miyazaki himself—they’d look at you like you had three heads. It’s just not on some people’s radar. They just want to have some fun killing monsters, I guess.
Besides the weirdness of masochism, there’s also a lack of more surface-level weirdness. There’s no cryptic laughter, and no NPCs feel really wholly suspicious and evil in the Fromsoft-y way. No one is really battle-worn, insane, or that freakish. We meet, for the most part, a lot of nice people, and voice actors who are doing slightly too peppy and friendly readings of the lines. And, again, nobody’s really hot, partially because almost everyone is just sane and nice. Nobody wanted to get weird in the writing room unfortunately, and for that, Lies of P falls short of being the freakish masterpiece it could’ve been.
The devs also misunderstood some of what makes Fromsoft games so addictingly difficult. They are not bullshit—not annoying—not hard just to be hard, just to say fuck you to the player, but present doable challenges that just take patience and skill. The game forces you to get good, and you get out of it what you put into it.
An actual death card. More like “pee or die trying” am i right???
Lies of P does present some good challenges, especially towards the end of the game, but it also deals a pretty heavy hand of bullshit like a lot of lesser soulslikes. Think item traps, ganky enemy placements, their own version of basilisks with an insta-kill status effect, that sort of thing. After a while it can feel old, but then you’re also expecting it around every corner, so the bullshit isn’t likely to get you. If anything, this is just slightly annoying—some levels and bosses have things that feel about as pointlessly annoying as the Nightmare Frontier in Bloodborne, but overall, I don’t feel like it really detracts from the game too much. My only real complaint would be that, when staggering late game bosses, they cease to just stagger and fall over for you to land a Fatal Attack, but manage to do one (or two) more attacks on their way down. Very annoying when you’re used to being able to rush in for the attack, but, again, not something you can’t learn to deal with.
Despite all this—and remember how dearly I hold the horny weird masochism of soulsborne games to my heart—Lies of P is still a solid 7.5/10 for me because it’s just that much fun to play. What the developers did not achieve in the game is a much, much smaller part of the game than its core component: just playing the game and having a good fucking time with it. It’s just great to play. It made me laugh a lot. Every time I got a quartz I yelled out “HELL YEAH I GET TO ACTIVATE MY P-ORGAN” and started laughing (all alone in my living room.) I got to be a killing machine in a frilly shirt, and I got a weapon with a fantastic polearm/staff move set that Fromsoft needs to pay attention to and put in their next goddamned game. I’m tired of getting a pole arm that has “poke” as its only move. Let me whip that bad boy around! It activates my p-organ!!!
There is—even after this nauseating word count of 4300 words—more I could say about it, but I’ll leave it here. If it piques your interest, go for it—it’s a good game.
It’s the season of half of everyone on socmed posting their spotify wrapped and the other half holier-than-thouing about not using spotify (or about how spotify is bad but maybe they still use it? it’s hard to tell.)
I’m doing neither and instead using the opportunity to talk about some of my favorite albums & artists from the past year and of all time.
This 2002 goth-inclined ethereal-wave album is a recent find of mine—early November or so—and I’ve been obsessed with it since the first listen. It’s got some of that thrumming goth guitar and bass alongside soprano vocals which give it a touch of what I can only describe as “fae frolicking in the distant shade of the forest”. “Shadows of Moonlit Nights” and “Eve” are two of my top tracks from the album.
A really ethereal, soothing album that feels so early 2000s in all the right ways.
I’ve been a huge fan of HTRK for ages, and their EP ‘Body Lotion’ is up there in the top five for me. I love their droney, noisy, bass-heavy, reverby and kind of slutty music (they’re on the same special wavelength that Boy Harsher occupies).
However, their 2021 album Rhinestones is… not really like that.
It’s spacey, ethereal, and largely acoustic and I hated it when it came out. I gave it a shot when it came out and it just didn’t click.
Then I saw this video on tumblr and instantly recognized the music as something from that HTRK album I didn’t like. I put the album on to give it another shot and here I am, obsessed with it.
It really is the same HTRK I’ve always been in love with, but much more stripped back. While early HTRK occupies the droning, dreamy reverb of deepest night, this is HTRK at the break of dawn.
“Real Headfuck”, “Gilbert and George” and “Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings” are my favorite tracks.
This is not a recent find for the year, but an all-time favorite. Dustin O’Halloran is a piano-soloist-turned-composer whose music you might recognize from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. This 2011 album deviates from piano solos and goes orchestral ,with songs featuring full orchestras* as well as quartets and quintets.
To save face I might just claim I only listen to this while I’m writing… that’s how my love for this album started out, using it as writing music for what would eventually become King of Knives – Sebastian**, but to be honest I just put it on whenever because it’s gorgeous.
Lumiere has a very specific feeling to me—truly one of light—but light through falling snow. There’s something sparkling-frozen in the notes, something like pure piercing warm light in tracks like “We Move Lightly”***.
Here is something rather overly poetic I wrote on my phone ages ago about this song. Most of the imagery is from Sebastian:
that sort of palpitating rhythm, a rising that reminds me of everything euphorically cold: moonlight, a sort of balmy-buttery wetness of the gleam in moonstone, and that taste of eidolon: pure white sandalwood, a metallic shriek of neroli, a bed of pale roses. the twinkling of moonlight on a lake, the absolute euphoria of the wind sweeping through the tops of the trees at night, their dark shapes moving against the stars, shining far beyond the touch of light pollution, the sound of it mimicking the sensation of gooseflesh breaking out over your skin from a soft touch of pleasure.
and snow
the blankets of snow melting shyly into the earth, the hard cracks of ice-edged mud upon which crystal clear droplets drip from bare branches. the crunch of the powder beneath leather boots. the snow, never ceasing drift of flakes down, across, lazily accumulating on a dark head, the cheeks and chin, nose and lips bright red from the bitterness of cold.
in this is a longing for a gloomy stone collection of rooms atop a mountain. a longing to be touched there, or beneath it, or…
the castle looms the way something looms within you, touching the back of your mind like a cobweb that you think—for a dash of a second—is an absent-minded hand. what is it? and what keeps touching you?
what are you that you do not know yet?
what, exactly, is up the mountain waiting for you in the snow?
there is a loss of innocence, a threshold crossed that can never be uncrossed, a pattern of kisses in the pattern of planets across warm skin, freckle to freckle.
and the snow, falling everywhere around you
“Quintett N.1” has a beautifully aching core—there is a flat sort of loneliness that swells and intertwines within the quintet. I find it so robustly beautiful, very hard to put into words, truly stunning.
Some of the most profound magic, though, happens in the album’s final track: “Snow and Light”.
here we are in the slow, crystalline fall of snow yet again. the pull of it is slower; there is a long, drawn out note beneath it now, a slow growing, aching, tender thing beneath thrumming from below the earth.
it is a song i have spent many times in bed just before sleep concentrating on, delving into that long, slow note, trying to meet it, only to have it disappear.
a violin, somewhere just in another room, perhaps in the hallway just out of sight. the song almost does not return to itself, to what draws me to it, what presents itself in the opening. but it does. it returns. slowly, nothing else is left, and we are left listening to static—to what might be a snowfall out a window looking into darkness. the lights are always off. there is nothing to see, only to hear.
can you hear it?
It is true—I like listening to this one in bed when I’m trying to fall asleep. There is a very long note—from a cello, I think—in the opening, that slowly swells in a way that chills me. It is one haunted thing in the midst of beauty.
And the ending… you have to listen to it with headphones on. It ends with over a minute of a static, distant storm. Emotionally it’s rather overwhelming in its perfection, the choice to let an album so evocative of snow and light to end on such meditative, lonesome weather… I don’t know, maybe I’m being silly, but I think it’s really magical.
I absolutely adore Mareux’s music. He’s sitting at the same table as Boy Harsher and HTRK with his goth, sort of dancey, reverby dark and weird tracks. Some of the lyrics are a bit unhinged as well, which makes it music that, well, to be honest, is great to listen to while imagining one of your favorite fucked up characters. It’s what I do!
This one is less well written than the other entries, so apologies for that. Check out “Cold Summer”, “Sail”, “Gopnik”, “Little Lies” and “The Perfect Girl.”
This one might be my most listened-to album of the year because it’s on my book playlist for The Lord of Astiigos.
It’s completely haunted. Creeping cold shadows, isolation, a constant unnerving feeling that never lets up. As an ambient album, the tracks don’t differ too much from each other, but all bleed in together, repeating motifs, swirling and echoing in and out of each other. Sometimes it’s beautiful, like “Melancholia III”, sometimes it’s a thin, nervy ghost of a melody from the past, like “Melancholia VII”.
I’m honestly unsure if this is a good one for casual listening, but it’s a fantastic album for writing gothic horror.
BONUS: DJ sets from Guatemalan DJ Márian on YouTube
This DJ puts up sets of really good Dark Italio Disco, which is exactly what it sounds like: darker, danceable, goth-y disco. The one linked has a track or two that sound, weirdly enough, like some of the more upbeat tracks from Netflix’s Devilman Crybaby adaptation****. So if you’re into that… give this a listen.
She doesn’t usually list the tracks in the set, but they all run a good hour to hour-and-a-half, making it great to put on and just get to work.
__________ *to my ear, at least, I don’t know what the actual term might be. **unfinished and on a very far back burner. this is a vampire book tho, very cool. ***this track, absolutely my favorite from the album, I once saw used over footage of a leek field in Wales in some documentary I was watching about food production in the UK. It was very funny. It was also a very good documentary!**** listening to this again, I think someone re-used a beat from the Devilman Crybaby soundtrack in one song, maybe “Akira The Wild (Night Version)” or .. another one I can’t figure out rn. That said, though, a slender portion of the Devilman Crybaby sound track is very dark disco!
Well, it’s NaNoWriMo again, bringing with it that siren song of consistency. If I could just write x amount a day…
This, after the multitude of -tober challenges, urges me to write about the false hope of consistency and dealing with the emotional aftermath of failing that consistency in a world which seems to think it’s the only way to write, to draw, or advance a creative skill.
After years of ignoring its call, I attempted a -tober drawing challenge this year. Vamptober, and since I’m already obsessed with the theme, I thought I could do it. It was a good way of getting myself back into drawing after a few horrible months of the worst RSI flare up I’ve ever experienced.
a pretty baller drawing of Dracula I did for day one, when hopes were still high
I managed 12 days of it—my birthday came and I spent it celebrating (and then resting from celebrating) instead of drawing. And then the prompts started piling up, and there was no way I was going to knock out three, then four, then five in a day.
I stopped after day 12. I might go back to it, but only when I want to. I am not an animal meant for consistency.
In fact, I think a lot of us creative types aren’t. Especially if we’re the intuition-, feelings- and inspiration-driven type and our desire to create is puppeted around by those unseen hands which appear and reappear in our lives at random.
This is why, if you’re one of these types, the -tober writing and drawing challenges, and especially NaNoWriMo can really shit on you and your creative spirit, especially if you are new to writing or drawing and desperately want to finally just get to grips with creating.
“If this is what I really want to do, why can’t I do it every day? It’s just an hour of drawing, it’s just 200 words, it’s just 500 words, I already have the outline done, I was able to sit down and write 3k in one go the other night, it’s just one sketch, the idea was already picked FOR ME, why can’t I just do this.”
I think it’s for the same reason that you don’t eat the same exact thing every single day. You don’t wear the same thing every day, you don’t live the same day every single day. That shit gets boring and it wears you out.
I don’t think, even if you are making a purposeful point to hone your skills, that you have to write or draw every single day.
This is a good video about how the “improve just a little bit every day” routine isn’t for everyone.
There are as many types of artists and writers out there as there are types of people. But because, I think, we like order, and we like the illusion of “just do these 10 steps to get to where you want to be” we completely ignore this fact and only see artists and writers lauded for their very consistent writing or drawing practices.
“I do a warm up drawing every day for an hour, then I get to my work.”
“I sit down at 11am after breakfast [which my wife made, and is cleaning up, before getting to all the housework all day] and just start writing until I have a full chapter. And I do this every single day, except maybe Saturdays or Sundays.”
“I write 200 words on the bus every day during my commute to work. Then I write another 300 waiting in meetings, another 200 on the bus coming home, and then a little bit more once the kids are in bed and my partner is watching TV.”
“I wake up at 5am every single day before the rest of the house for some peace and quiet and write 1000 words before breakfast.”
A lot of this sounds feasible, and it seems obvious why these authors might be successful. They show up every day and just do it!
And all of us (probably) have the physical ability to: write on our phone wherever we are, have a laptop out, get on the computer every day, wake up a bit earlier, stay up a bit later, shuffle routines around to carve out time to get that word processor open and ready for work.
But can we create every day?
If I force myself to create something every single day whether I want to or not, I will end up writing or drawing garbage at some point, which will make a bigger mess for me later than if I just skipped that day.
Also, looking at this shit I’ve made will depress the fuck out of me, and will not inspire me to do more of it. In fact, it will make me start resenting the whole thing. This might be what happens to you, too.
Here is the resentment process:
This is really fun! I can do this an hour a day → it’s fun for two or three days → you have a bad day and can’t get your dailies done → the bad feeling and the guilt over not getting it done if it’s “so easy” creeps in → this makes you want to avoid the project entirely and/or beat yourself up, turning the thing you love into a source of shame, frustration, or resentment.
If you’re working on building your skills and just aren’t feeling it that day, do you really want to sit down and watch yourself struggle with drawing something that doesn’t satisfy you again?
A daily practice is not the only way to increase your skills. To get better, you need to practice your medium a lot, but it’s a practice in volume not in consistency. 5 sketches a day for 10 days is fine, it sounds more feasible, but you can sit down in an afternoon and do 50 sketches and then not touch your sketchbook for a week. You will probably see more improvement in one session of 50 sketches than doing 5 kind of shitty sketches a day, especially if you’re blocking out a good amount of time and giving yourself time to focus on what your flaws are and how to improve them with each sketch.
You can power level like that—that’s how I work.
When it comes to my creative output, I don’t push myself to do anything daily. Even commission work I wait on until I’m in the right head space and have the energy and mental clarity to really pay proper attention and not do sloppy work that I’ll just have to fix later. Yes, my commissions all have deadlines–which a lot of clients are pretty lenient with–but I take my deadlines very seriously.
I always get my work done, even with the mode of “I’ll work on it when I feel ready for it.”
Working only when I feel ready for it helps maintain cycles of work and rest. You absolutely have to maintain cycles of work and rest. Especially rest. Refueling with fun and play is essential to maintaining a fun and playful mindset with your creative output as well.
“I’m just going to play around with this chapter and see what I can do with it. No worries if it’s not perfect, I can play around with it later when I have the energy again.” This is a healthy attitude towards writing (and editing) coming from someone that is prioritizing rest, play, joy and working with themselves instead of against themselves.
[Might you get tired of editing and re-editing the same chapter over and over? Is that what I’m currently facing with The Lord of Astiigos right now? Is the nth version of chapter one currently open in Scrivener, looming behind this document? YES! But do I feel a crushing self-loathing for my “inability to write” or whatever just because I am working on version like, 8 of a chapter? Nope. Is it the MOST fun thing in the world to edit yet again? Not really, but I’m not beating myself up about this. I am just going to play around and see what happens and if my new edits achieve what I’m looking for.]
“Dear god okay I need to get back to this chapter, fuck okay it’s really important and it has to be good and I just need to get it done I just need 500 good words today please can my brain just give me 500 good words.” This is an overly serious, usually very self-hating attitude towards your own creative output (one that is usually tied to self worth. “I must create good things to be good”, which is false. You are a human being not a singular creative skill you are still working on—for we are always working on our skill level, no matter how long we’ve been creating.) This mindset is dogmatic, it’s black and white, it’s forgotten that creativity is play—you’re supposed to be having FUN! It would probably help more to close the document and get some much needed rest or play in. Go load up the easiest, dumbest, goofiest, pure-candy video game you have until you remember how to have fun again. And then bring that energy back to your project.
[I understand this is difficult with depression. The curious and playful mindset towards creative output might need to be faked until it clicks in your brain. It can also help to ask yourself again why you’re writing what you’re writing—what makes you go crazy about it? Focusing on that can help push through, too.]
Remember the resentment process. It can turn a source of joy into one of frustration and shame and self loathing. Does that feel like what you experience? You’re not meant for these daily word counts/daily drawing challenge routines, then, which is fine. You can do this shit whenever you want. Forcing yourself to work on a creative project when you do not want to will make you burn out 10x faster.
So, remember: you do not have to create every day. Not to be a “real” artist or writer. Not either to reliably increase your skill.
The path towards finishing books, drawings, improving your writing or drawing skill is not constrained to the daily habit, and you are not a failure for not being able to do these challenges every day. Some people just don’t work that way. And that’s alright.
I’ve been using myNoise for ages to help with writing. myNoise is a website with well over a hundred customizable sound generators, and it still has the values of the old internet: you do not need to subscribe to the damn thing. You can donate for a few extra perks (it’s worth it) but you do not get roped into some kind of $20-a-month subscription thing. It’s great, the soundscapes are masterpieces, and the site is constantly updated with new ones.
I can’t even fit all the generators in one page.
1. First and foremost: this site has calibration for your own hearing curve.
If you have hearing loss, tinnitus, or just want to make sure you’re getting the most out of what you’re hearing, you can have the site’s sounds adjusted to your hearing range. This feature is not locked behind a donation-wall, but free for everyone to use.
You can access calibration by clicking on the soundscape you want to listen to, and finding the ‘iEQ – Calibration’ on the left hand side.
2. Preset color noises and scenes.
Each soundscape, no matter how simple or complicated, has a selection of presets for color noises (white, pink, and brown) and different scenes. You can use hotkeys to instantly have the soundscape leveled to create white noise, pink noise, or brown noise, all of which have their places in calming or noise blocking. Some generators also offer grey noise in the scene presets.
If that isn’t enough, you can pick from scene presets, which are fantastic especially for writers looking to recreate an exact feeling. Rain Noise gives you: Speech Blocker, Fairy Rain, Bedroom, Under the Porch, Distant Storm, Getting Wet, Only Rumble, Under the Leaves, Dark Rain and Jungle Lodge, all of which use the same 10 sliders to create different proximity/intensity and experience of rain. (There are, like, 5 or 10 rain soundscapes on the site, though, so it doesn’t stop there.)
But let’s look at a more complicated one, because myNoise is full of really robust soundscapes.
Medieval Library has no noise color presets, but can transport you to: The Quiet Room, The Fireplace, The Chapel, Paperwork, and Empty Room.
Honestly I could be here all day listing generators I like and the presets they offer, it’s really incredible. But there’s more than just scenes…
3. You can adjust all 10 sliders yourself
Say you find a preset you like, but you want more cricket noises. Okay, crank up the cricket 1 slider. Or maybe cricket 1 and 2. You can adjust any soundscape in any way you want to fit your taste, or the scene you’re imagining in your head. Crank up what you want, crank down what you don’t.
4. Animate sliders for more dynamic scenes
You can have the sliders animate slowly or quickly to get a more organic feeling, or just… keep yourself from getting bored of the same exact levels after three fucking hours of writing. Animation is really great for nature landscapes, but it can be especially helpful if, say, you’re writing a character walking around a medieval village. Put the sliders for Medieval Village on animate and the sliders will mimic walking about different parts of a village. The same can be used for wandering around forests, deserted old west ghost towns, haunted houses, or getting a more organic feeling out of a battlefield or trip through deep, dark space.
5. Patrons can create entirely custom generators
If you give myNoise five or ten bucks, even if it was just once, a year ago (but maybe donate more if you use it often), you get access to creating your own generator. You use hot keys to select the sliders you want, then when you’ve got 10 picked, hit the hotkeys for compiling and there you go—a custom set of ten.
I recently used this to create a specific room for the book I’m writing right now. Three of the super low sliders for a distant ocean, three or four were howling wind, and the rest were mid-highs of a fireplace. This let me get right in there with my characters—distant waves, a howling wind threading through the night, the close pop and crackle of a fire.
This is by no means as crazy as custom generators can get, because you really can put anything you want together. If you’re writing a scene on a futurist submarine that’s haunted and the uh, the main character has a purring cat on their lap and are listening to piano music… I mean you can do that. That’s all on myNoise. The options are truly endless.
You can make utter shit, too: ‘calm office’ meets ‘rpg battlefield’ with the distant, haunting drone of a didgeridoo… a guy listening to a numbers station while in a sauna that’s for, whatever reason, right off of a racetrack. During a race. And the sauna is dealing with a frog infestation. I mean the world is really your oyster here. Get crazy.
So, how do you best use all this shit, especially as a writer?
1. Use it the OG way: block out background noise
You don’t have to use something scene specific. You might just need to try to block out construction noise or a TV in another room. Plugging in your headphones and putting on a certain soundscape might help you get into flow state, too, so you can boost your concentration and signal to your brain that it’s time to work. (Lights low and headphones on are always my go-to for this, though I don’t know how well I have flow state on demand…)
2. Use a soundscape for brainstorming
It’s not always the easiest to transport ourselves into the worlds of our books. Maybe it takes place in a time and place we’ve never been… and if you have to juggle that with plot stuff and character motivation, sometimes stuff can slip through the cracks.
Load up a soundscape that’s similar to the setting of a scene you need to work on, and try to get in touch with how it feels to be there. Again, it might help to turn the lights off and use headphones or earbuds. Close your eyes… what does this feel like? How strong is the wind? What does it smell like? Are there too many people around? Too few? How might the emotions of the scene shed light on how a character interacts with their surroundings? Is this an emotionally difficult scene in a place that feels so wide open, and so lonesome, that the wind sweeping over the grasses makes them feel even more alone? Even more destitute? Is the house creaking and groaning above and beneath them, making them feel like they’re not just in paranormal danger… but physical as well? Does the hum of cicadas remind you that oh, yes, this is a humid, sticky place. The standing water is full of dead bugs, of larvae, and the air is close and hot, even after sunset…
Run through the scene, the dialogue, the beats while listening. Writers with aphantasia might find soundscapes especially helpful, since it relies on evoking a setting without having to visualize anything.
Getting in touch with your setting audibly can really help you anchor your scene and give it an extra feeling of tangibility for the reader, especially if you want the setting to feature prominently. And you might just think of elements to include, and better ways to describe those elements, that you wouldn’t have without experiencing them in the soundscape.
3. The obvious one: use it while writing.
Yup, uh, put the thing on while you’re in the scene. It’s raining, the character is in their bedroom, and you got Bedroom scene of Rain Noise on. Alrighty. A lot of stuff from the point above can come into play here, too. You might just think of something extra to add while listening…
4. The less obvious one: use it for feeling.
So there are some weird, creepy ass generators on myNoise, which is great if you’re writing horror. If you’re easily frightened, I’d say delve into the ones with ghost icons with caution, but scary isn’t the only feeling you can evoke with sound generators. If you know a soundscape makes you feel calm or peaceful, and you’re writing a calm and peaceful scene, slap that bad boy on. If you’re writing a strange altered state, a dreadful foreboding, you might put something like Bell’s Breath or Black Lyra on to get into the weird vibe.
The soundscapes don’t need to be literal in terms of place, but they can be great for feeling. What soundscape makes you feel a certain way though is totally personal—you’ll have to figure out which ones are your go-tos for evoking feeling.
And that’s it!
If you’re interested in incorporating this into your writing routine, give yourself an hour or so before your next writing session to poke around the site and see what you like. Try out calibrating the sounds to your hearing, and then try some of the more basic ones (thunder, rain, fireplace) and figure out what color noise you like the best (I always find brown noise the most calming.) You can use that info later if generators have a color noise setting and if you want it to have the most calming or best noise blocking properties.
Then get weird with it. Give them five or ten bucks and see if you can create custom gens based on scenes in your book. Though, don’t make a whole bunch at once to use later, as I’m unsure at the time of writing this if you can save them, but I’m sure there is a way and I just don’t know what it is. Get stuck in to a good one and hit up pinterest or unsplash–or maybe you already have a folder of reference images—and find visual references for your book and just soak that shit up.
This is, by the way, totally okay to do—you never have to create in a total void. Inspire yourself as much as you can. I mean, I even put on evocative perfume for some projects to really get in the zone. Most of us I think write in places and eras we’ve never lived in and could never go to—so of course it makes sense to try to “visit” with a creepy old soundscape and some sick pictures of castles to look at.
As a final note, too, I’ll just mention that this is a really nice site to have on hand for non-writing work. And just… living. I like Japanese Garden a lot to just have on when I’m feeling a bit low and want some pleasant nature sounds to perk me up. Distant Thunder I play sometimes when sleepless—the site does have an app version (though you have to buy some generators) as well as tracks available on some music streaming platforms. I find a really low, distant rumble of thunder really soothing at night. You might find something that really soothes you, too, and and is completely unrelated to your writing work. That’s cool as hell.
This is just to say, if this was Blogger in 2009 shit would be looking great right now. This whole set up thing is making me feel so old. Where are the normal ass just normal fuckin blogs where I can set the typeface to what I want? Why are there 8000 un-intuitive editors.
My vamptober drawing of Klaus Kinksi as Graf Dracula in Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht dying from sunlight but spiritually it is also a drawing of me perishing from 2023 wordpress.
