greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. I was desperately trying to find music to listen to in order to write this post but nothing was sticking!!! so I put on white noise from mynoise.net and we shall see if that works. anyways. not quite able to stick to the once a week update schedule but. better two and a half weeks than 5 months am I right.
dragula
this section of the blog will include thumbnails that click into nsfw images and spoiled nsfw text because some of the performances got WILD!!! ye have been warned… also all the videos I link to are really loud because the music was BLASTING. hover over spoiled text to reveal it. wahoo.
I mentioned last entry that I was going to see the dragula world tour that upcoming weekend, and then I forgot to promptly write my experience with that whoops. nyanyways. I had a blast!! I think throb zombie absolutely stole the show for me and I promise I’m not just saying that because of their ghostface themed set LMAO. I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get a special guest at our stop on the tour but I understand that it would be difficult to promise one for every single stop. what can you do. my sister and I had pretty good seats, being about midway back from the stage. the whole row in front of us wasn’t filled until after intermission?? which I thought was kinda wild. why are you showing up an hour late to an event you paid for kinda thing.
like I said, I think throb zombie was the highlight of the night. insanely charismatic, makeup and outfits were amazing. also yeah the ghostface set was hot. I am so normal tm. I got spoiled on it thru instagram stories but I was not prepared for the whole thing. also really enjoyed the cringefail ghostface bit in the middle. who the fuck else is shaking their ass in ghostface cosplay to a metal cover of call me baby.
with blackberri’s sets, I had seen the bride of frankenstein at spookala, but the lipsync to i’m not okay really sent me. I felt seen as a wannabe emo kid in the early 2010’s. also the scene queen outfit unironically ripped. I want it for myself actually. orkgotik I thought was lacking a little bit on the performance side (which makes sense since they don’t have as much stage experience as some of the other drag artists) but getting to see their particular form of drag in person was magical. I mean it genuinely when I say I don’t think anyone else is making art like theirs, and I think it’s so important to have people who make Weird Ass Art. I’m so excited to see how their craft evolves in the future.
might be a shocker but I was a little let down by niohuru x. I think all of her looks were taken from pieces used in the show while the other three performers had at least one of their looks new to the tour. unsure on orkgotik but with the construction of their looks I’m not sure how reusable the outfits are. anyways same as orkgotik her performances were a little lacking, but I did get to see the does spider have puss puss prosthetics that I was obsessed with in the show just for being so bizarre so that was a plus. also got to see (part of) my favorite look in some pieces from the nine tailed fox demon look. also like orkgotik I am so impressed by her art. like. from no one else am I going to see synthetic organs pulled out of a vagina on a pregnant belly. absolutely fucking insane and I am living for it. please keep making weird art.
the boulet brother interludes were fine I suppose. I get they were mainly padding out time for the other performers to change outfits and makeup so the inbetween segments weren’t too crazy. rip to that guy they sacrificed live on stage though </3
dragula was FUN!!! would go again. throb zombie please come back to [LOCATION REDACTED] to do another show please please please.
ghost jam 2024
aka the reason I didn’t update last week. I will be fairly brief here as I plan to write a two (maybe three) parter post on the event with 1) a post mortem of my own projects, and 2) a roundup of all the submissions this year with my brief thoughts on each. what I will say here is that I am so glad I managed to submit not one, but two different entries for ghost jam this year… after trying and failing to make something for ghost masquerade 6, as well as numerous ghost jams in previous years that have passed me by, I finally managed to scrape myself off the floor and put together some little guys for it. I roped in one of my friends, decomakke, to draw the shell for one of the entries since I knew in the past that I tend to get Deep In The Weeds when it comes to making art for a ghost. also, I wanted to make an ukagaka with art that wasn’t my own, since I’ve drawn my own shells for all of my previous projects.
hard to say what my favorites from the batch are, since I haven’t yet explored all of the ghosts in full, but celeste and LOBO really stand out to me so far. celeste because I really enjoy phantasia’s art style and story writing, and LOBO scratches the itch I have for surrealist dialogue.
other things
I started playing honkai star rail! for better or worse…. unfortunately boothill has activated my neurons so I started the game for him and played fervently to scrape together enough currency to pull him in the gacha. yes I have broken my self imposed rule of no more gacha games. I’m not particularly proud I cracked for one guy but in my defense I feel like they targeted his design Specifically To Me. Sighs. i managed to get him around 50 pulls in and then got his light cone shortly after so my interest to play hsr has diminished significantly. it’s not that nothing else in the game is interesting, its that it’s not interesting enough for me to want to keep chugging at the breakneck speed I was going through the story before. I’ll probably still keep picking at the story for the time being since I know boothill shows up later in the story and I Want To See Him. but the current arc I’m on (the second, or third if you count the prequel-ish area you start in) is Just Okay so far.
project updates!!! I spent most of my creative energy these past two weeks on ghost jam tbh. I’m slowly realizing that art fight is just around the corner and I’m debating cleaning up the ocs I have posted on there. purge some old guys. add some new ones. we’ll see if I get around to drawing new references because notoriously I do not like drawing oc references since I think they are boring to draw and look at. otherwise uhhh still figuring out what I want to do this month. go figure. I spent my long weekend on ghost jam.
still… not doing great on language practice. I might end up resetting a few levels on wanikani because my review pile seems to not be budging… I also kind of need to get back into a routine of working on it though soo. we will see. spanish and toki pona still on the backburner.
also still taking a break from twitter. i still post art to my art account but i’ve only hopped on my main account a few times to make a few tweets or scroll through fanart. even with the oldtwitter extension being fixed now i still feel so fantastically meh about being on twitter that I haven’t had the desire to return. not being on twitter hasn’t directly translated into me getting more things done persay, since I still spent like a good week and a half playing honkai star rail every waking moment. boowhomp
that does it for now!! see you in another [INSERT TIMEFRAME HERE]