xeneth.design

 The intent was to make this round's words a pretty light lift, so I was reaching for immediate associations and familiar patterns. All the recent news/coverage for Super Mario Bros Wonder means I have platformer design on the brain, so from " Houseplant " and " Diet " I immediately pull Little Shop Of Horrors and Piranha Plants...     At this juncture I'd like to detour a bit to talk about one of the many tiny ways in which "the algorithmic gods" like Google are slowly and steadily making the internet less useful. In talking about the above with my partner, the topic shifted to whether or not the Piranha Plants in Mario games were originally inspired by Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors , or if they were arrived at organically via a similar synthesis and monsterization of real life carnivorous plant life. The former sounded more likely to me than the latter, but I typed "little shop of horrors release date"  into Google just to be su...

I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that...

     Keeping the ETNO random-three-word-prompted art streak alive for another week! This time around, the simian imagery just didn't seem to be getting me anywhere, so I looked closer and latched onto the way the spelling of the word implied subversive military action instead of primates. Unfortunately "Guerrilla" plus "Spirit" immediately sent me in the direction of ghosts on a Vietnamese war battlefield; a huge percentage of my instincts and impulses these days seem to be morbid and negative, but I don't have the energy to fight that too much in the context of what's supposed to be a very light creative lift, so here we are. From there, "Electronics" made me think of a military cellular communications backpack. So the mental image was a radio-wave-ghost hovering over the remains of a Western battlefield comms soldier in a spike trap.     Unless curbed, I can see a natural escalation in the amount of artistic skill and effort that goes into...