Back in 2023, I commissioned Wolfgun for a song about the Atayaska, or the walking hole in reality formerly known as Sinuk Vauntariaq. Three years later this song is just as unreal to me as it was during that first listen. Wolfgun’s music has been a part of my life for a long time, and is one of the formative inspirations for her story. I could not be happier with the way he breathed life into it.
And… I was sitting on my hands about it all this time… because I have this neurosis about sharing things before they are finished…! I am working on Basedt and Threadbare for the foreseeable future, and Sinuk’s story seems like a distant dream right now. But NO MORE! It’s a shame to let this song languish on my drive and haunt me personally. I am inflicting it upon you the same way the Atayaska inflicts violence upon memory. Maybe that word salad will mean something in 8 years when I get around to finishing her story up, but it means something to me right now, and you ☝ may derive meaning from this also
Support Wolfgun! You can see his notes on the song here and check out the rest of his work at his bandcamp. He made a whole video game. Really really really cool stuff.
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Does moribund have any blorbos you like to torture in particular? If you can’t pick one, do a top 3
I was about to say “I like to put them all into situations” but actually, it’s more like I am a captive stenographer to which Sadren is dictating (unprompted) his travails in love and causing international turmoil. So I have to sit down and think about who I actually go out of my way to bother.
I guess Old Mora is one of my throughlines for Moribund. I drag her into every story I can. I don’t know how to express the function of her very well… But if Moribund were a video game, she would be the giant watchful death bird hidden in random corners of the world whose presence is never explained, really, but is constantly felt after you find her... if you find her... like, sometimes you just want to see what’s over the next hill. It could be anything. Giant Bird
She's not very personable and doesn’t like to reveal her interior world to me though. It takes a lot of time to figure out what she does or says, but it usually ends up expanding the world in an interesting way. I figured out the other day that she might have a part in keeping the East and West cardinal stars from falling out of conjunction. This also makes her an annoyance in the far South, because she brings the light out into the polar night when the Sun hasn’t yet returned. Catching sight of Mora dragging false suns through the sky is a brief reprieve from the polar dark, but also an awful omen. Everything she does to “help” (if at all she thinks she’s helping) seems to cause commensurate mayhem.
As for a more traditional blorbo… I think it might have to be Sinuk… Like, yes, this is the woman who I wrote into a black hole and annihilated. And her way of dealing with being written out of the story was to write herself back into the story, but imperfectly, like she had to cut and paste each letter by hand with safety scissors.
But more than that, I just think it’s fun to report on her post-post-doc activities. What’s she up to these days! She is good at taking up enough space to cause friction, but not so much that she steals everyone else’s thunder (not if it isn’t funny, at least.) I like to send her to distant corners of the world and introduce her to random characters and see what happens. My favorite kind of post-script daydreaming is goofy or mundane scenarios that are forever colored by the fact that these people went through hell to be able to have something as simple as this. I want Sinuk to have lots of those! … because of the black hole… and also because she’s a fun surface for other characters to bounce off of.
OK. I was collecting pictures of Sinuk bothering people but I lost the plot a little and so basically this is a Sinuk post now.
Happy anniversary of My House Burnt Down. We are so back.
Basedt will be back to updating with a new page on Saturdays again… usually… I say “usually” because I am still stumbling through the wreckage of last year, and I am realizing this is a period in my life where I have to be flexible with what I can realistically expect from myself.
Part of the reason it has taken so long to build up my page buffer is because the construction of the secondary border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border— and the protection of certain sites along it—is occupying my personal time. Probably the best thing you could do for me, if you rrrreaaaaaally want Basedt to update more, is to spread the word or call your reps and oppose the double wall. I hate to put it that way, but them’s the realities of the world we’re living and making art in. It sucks. I hate it. Selfishly I just want to make my webcomic and my twine game, but nobody is coming to save us, you know?
Wherever you are reading from, I hope you’re finding ways to put good into the world, and seeing small victories from that. Our struggles are bound up together, and sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of that when we are stuck fighting our own fires.
… And speaking of fire… Let’s find out what this guy’s fucking deal is
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Stop Construction of a (Second) Border Wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument ▶︎
Stop the construction of the wall in Big Bend Ranch State Park & Big Bend National Park ▶︎
Draw a line anywhere in the Southwest, and you can’t walk it without stumbling into something special. Saguaro forests, sacred springs, age-old geoglyphs, missions, mines, migration routes, rivers, and rock art. You catch my drift? There’s an invisible line in the sand and it means something to me. I live and work in service of this place. This is my Sistine Chapel, my place of emergence, the body of my mother. And some men of power want to run that body through with steel bollards. Again. I guess it didn’t work the first time?
Countless cultural sites and natural wonders lie along the U.S.-Mexico border, and they face renewed threats under the proposed expansions to the border wall. The DHS wants to put a wall in places where the wall was never a consideration, such as Big Bend National Park. Secondary walls are proposed for places that have already been permanently damaged by the construction of the last border wall, such as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and Coronado National Memorial. This would expand the footprint of the wall exponentially and enclose sacred sites like A’al Vaipia (Quitobaquito Springs) and La Lomita Historical Park. They could be cut off entirely—not just from the surrounding landscape, but from public access, too.
This does not have to happen. There is no mandate to trade our common heritage for the illusion of safety. From the bottom of my heart, from my humanity to yours, please advocate for these places.
More info + action items at No Al Muro, Sky Island Alliance, and the Center for Biological Diversity.
As I was making these, news coverage was still thin and scattered for some of the affected areas, but there is now an excellent summary:
The aggressive pace of expansion has alarmed advocates who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites.
The Las Playas intaglio is a 15 by 83 meter etching in the ground at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s thought to be more than 1,000 years old and is significant to the Hia-ced O’odham and their relatives, who have skillfully made a home in one of the driest sections of the Sonoran Desert.
This painting is a celebration of the intaglio’s life. I know that many people will be learning of this little intaglio on the heels of its bulldozing, and I feel deep, deep sadness for that, because knowing that it exists has brought me a lot of joy, even in the two short years I was aware of its existence. How much more joy and mystery it must bring to the O’odham, whose relatives traced and re-traced it into the earth over many generations! And the Martynecs, the archaeologists who rediscovered it in 2002! There is so much to grieve because there is so much to celebrate. I’m going to try to capture some of that for you, OK?
Image source: AN IMPERILED INTAGLIO by Richard Martynec
This intaglio is unique for Southern Arizona because there are so few of them out here. The closest I’m aware of are further south, in Mexico. This intaglio is actually etched into the same lava field as those intaglios—it’s at the northern edge of El Pinacate, a young volcanic field studded with crater-like maars, volcanic cones, and lava flows.
El Pinacate likes to hold its water in secret and unexpected places. You will find centuries-old footpaths leading seemingly to nowhere, stumbling along a vast black plain that even the cacti haven’t quite found a foothold in. And then suddenly the land collapses, a sheer ravine opens like a crack in mud, and there it is: a dense thicket of ironwood trees enclosing a tinaja. This is a basin in the bedrock that can hold rainwater for months, if not years.
These tinajas are part of an assembly of springs, seeps, charcos, and arroyos that make the Sonoran Desert a rich and nurturing place for those who know how to find water. The intaglio itself is just south of a playa, a salty flat where rainwater collects for a short time after it rains. Rain often comes in dramatic but spotty bursts out here, hammering one mountain range and completely missing another just a few miles away. Being able to read where rain has fallen (and not fallen) allows people to access resources that are otherwise unavailable to them. I imagine that Las Playas were very special places in years when they were a riot of wildflowers and spring color.
The location of the intaglio is certainly not accidental. It’s wedged between two places of seasonal bounty, and it also belongs to a wider landscape of trails going to and from the Sea of Cortez, another place of plenty. This region is like the gateway connecting Central America to North America. Everything must pass through here. How beautiful is it that, in a place that holds no water for many months out of the year, we are reminded of its constant power and presence? Water was here and will be here again. People were here and will be here again.
The intaglio is described as fish-shaped, and that’s probably one of our better guesses of what it represents. Fishing in the Sea of Cortez was (and still is) an important source of food. But the intaglio was maintained by people dabbling in a mix of Patayan, Hohokam, and Trincheras regional styles, with a particularly strong Patayan slant. What is interesting to me about Patayan art is that their designs are often highly abstract. People sometimes dismiss these abstractions as “primitive,” merely squiggles and shapes compared to the more literal representations of people or animals found in other parts of the Southwest. But to me, these are highly sophisticated designs because they defy outsider interpretation. How much knowledge had to be passed from person to person to interpret and recreate these symbols? How much of it embodies cultural perceptions of beauty or the natural order of the world? Is it the process of etching that takes precedent over the outcome? I see that abstraction mirrored here, and that is part of what makes the intaglio so compelling to me.
And there is so much to be said about the intaglio’s design. There are several large stones strewn about the surrounding lava field. Some were deposited naturally, and some were moved around. Many of the stones within the bounds of the intaglio were undisturbed, and seem to have been incorporated into the design itself, or at least worked around. Was this part of the siting intentional, too? Was this place chosen because of these stones? While painting the intaglio, I struggled to interpret where the design begins and ends, because it is beautifully fluid with the landscape. I ultimately chose to incorporate those surrounding stones, which are represented in the painting as pale nodes in the outline. In doing so, I noticed that the northernmost chain of rocks resembles the Big Dipper. In O’odham, this constellation is the Kuipud, or cactus hook, a long, cross-shaped tool that is used to gather saguaro fruit. The harvest is an important precursor to the summer rain ceremonies, and the act of hooking down saguaro fruit is likened to hooking down the clouds that give rain. Is the resemblance a happy accident? Intentional? I don’t know, and it’s beautiful that I don’t!
The intaglio is oriented almost perfectly North to South, with its body slanting slightly east. It lines us up nicely with El Pinacate and the Sea of Cortez. It also makes me wonder what the sky must look like in different parts of the year out there, because the North star is the spoke around which everything turns, celestially. Was that an anchor for the design? Or just a tool to locate north and communicate something essential about the two directions? The orientation is surely intentional, but we can only guess at the “why.”
The Martynecs mention many faint trails inside the intaglio that are not very visible from these aerial images, and are best viewed on the ground at sunset. What else was in the landscape that we can no longer see today? The intaglio itself defies the human eye. It’s set in flat lava plains and low basins with few high points to look down on it. It was created on the ground, and yet people never would have experienced it the way many of us do today, in aerial imagery.
Its location, scale, and aesthetic abstraction lends to its subtlety. Prior archaeological surveys missed it. Western archaeology has only known about it for 20-odd years. Others who might have known about it haven’t identified themselves, and probably with good reason. Like so many sensitive cultural sites, it has been safe in obscurity. Now it finds itself on an arbitrary line and that safety is compromised.
During the construction of the primary border wall, the Martynecs and co. went to a lot of trouble to protect the intaglio:
The Martynecs wanted [the intaglio] preserved, so they recruited some friends and set about encircling it with small rocks, along with an adjacent gravesite that would definitely encroach on [the Roosevelt reservation, a 60 ft. strip adjacent to the U.S. Mexico border set aside for border security.]
The construction supervisor arrived and demanded to know what they were doing. They explained, and he left. When he returned, he was accompanied by a crew. To the Martynecs’ surprise and delight, the contractor ordered large boulders to be arranged around the site to protect it. In addition, they diverted the road fifteen feet, to secure the grave.
I love this anecdote, I think it’s so illustrative of our common humanity and the value of educating each other. It’s true, there are hazards that come with knowing, sometimes things are safer when they remain unknown. But we also can’t protect what we don’t know about, and this was a victory in a time of excruciating loss.
The same efforts have been made during the construction of the secondary barrier. The Tohono O’odham nation, Cabeza Prieta staff, archaeologists, and concerned community members have all converged to protect this intaglio. I wish the story had ended here. I had naively believed that I would someday see this little intaglio that I had read and talked so much about. If I do see it, I will see it in fragments. We have lost something precious and irreplaceable and there is so much now that we will never know.
But I also am not willing to sing funeral songs for something that is not yet lost. After I learned of what had happened to the intaglio, I was gutted, I knew that I cared about it but not to what an extreme extent it would affect me. It was like the stages of grief hit me all at once. And I am not even in close proximity to it! How devastating must this feel to those who have seen it themselves? To those who came ahead of the construction to see it, to run and to pray for it? To those who fought so hard to protect it through the devastation of the last wall, and now this one?
But in that sadness I was also overwhelmed with this powerful, almost uncontrollable compulsion to try to paint it. I didn’t know why at the time, it seemed absurd and arbitrary, but I think I get it now. The Las Playas intaglio was maintained by people choosing to retrace it, to remember it. And although we have lost so much, it is still here with us—transformed, transfigured, split in two, but still here. And how infinitely worth remembering! How beautiful! How resilient! How critically important to carry into the future! The loss is incomprehensible and yet commensurate with the joy. That is what I felt, painting and reading about the intaglio. I found I could not let go of my sadness any more than I could stop this uncontrollable joy and affection from entering me.
There is still time, after all, for this to be the final injury of the border wall. So much remains along the border that is worth the joy and heartache of fighting for. 25 miles to the east, the sacred oasis A’al Vaipia (Quitobaquito Springs) remains, a silent witness in the shadow of the previous border wall. It has endured so much, and I know it will endure what may come, but that enduring will require allies that are as willing to give for its life as it has given life to all who visit it.
Walk anywhere along the border and you will find something just as special and irreplaceable. Our struggles at Big Bend, Coronado, La Lomita, Cabeza Prieta, Organ Pipe Cactus, Mount Kuuchamaa, and elsewhere are bound up together. What has happened here does not have to happen to us again, or to our neighbors. Let’s carry this little “fish” with us, OK?
Threadbare is a “visual” “”novel”” about a martyr exacting revenge on the prophet who foretold her death. Make him pay! Fail upward! Change nothing! Fulfill your awful, awful destiny!
Threadbare features:
The indomitable power of spite, through which all things can be accomplished!
One-sided(?) tension(??) with the guy you’re doomed to kill!
The machinations of a deeply stupid meritocracy, which asks “what if we put wealthy art patrons in charge of a communications & intelligence agency?”
Running errands against your will!
High effort low art! Low effort high art? Low effort low art. It still took me nine months. And it’s not even done!
What I can only describe as a slideshow with quicktime events scored by industrial noise metal!
This guy, I guess !!
This is like… a pre-alpha demo. It covers maybe a third of the story, and its code is held together by duct tape and a wish. Mostly this is an excuse to get other people to break it so I know what to fix. Enjoy!
I pushed some quality-of-life and accessibility tweaks for Threadbare... You can toggle the typewriter animations and expand the dialogue chains all at once and selectively mute the UI/vox sfx now... never been a better time to bother Kairos, if you haven't already
My friend told me to send you my e1dols despite not having this collection finished,,
Sighh peep my ultrakill layer yuri (Greed and Fraud)
Wish I could put warnings on these images for realistic heart/gore,,
I do plan to make more of these e1dols btw, my next focus is the Violence layer in Ultrakill and after that I think was Gluttony and then Wrath
WOAHHHHH THESE ARE TIGHT AS HELL!! a certain very meaty and bloody hell even. I look forward to seeing the series as a unit! and also I have to say that I love Fraud taking the appearance of the "victim" in the archetypal pairing pose. I think of the pose as reciprocal, like bothering an overstimulated cat, or schmoozing for a kiss. and far be it from them to deny Greed!
compulsory "more stuff in da shop" announcement...
Keepsakes from a doomed world.
I'm most excited about having my No Double Wall protest art on a shirt. I don't make a dime off of them, they're really just there for me and the 2 other people in my community who are pissed off enough to do shirts about it. so they're cheaper than everything else.
Teemill is also doing a sale from the 16th to the 23rd. EARTH10 at checkout for 10% off.
OK. I think that's enough consumerism for one day or I'm going to throw up
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.i accidentally spread e1dols to a big friend group server and one of them has now somehow made an e1dol 3d model that they can project e1dol drawings onto for the texture and it works
hello??????? HELLO??????????????
getting up and walking around my house about it. losing my mind. at the intersection of hooting and hollering. This is SICK AS FUUUUUCK and reminds me of the randomly assigned textures in LSD dream emulator, my fav kind of computer-human collaboration... thank you so much to you and your friend for sharing, this made my day!
i made me an e1dol. because i cant draw i made the m with photos instead
he lives in my computer and keeps me safe from malicious hardware of course
WOHHHHHHH BIG fan of the patterning that the slight offset to the text makes on him! he reminds me of the punchcards that they used to use in computer programming... thank you for making an e1dol and with the unique tools that you have available to you! I'm inspired now... Collage e1dol... HmmMMmm
hello. can I interest you in this hard rock cover of Bad Romance. and this warmup of miss thang that got away from me while I was trying to do threadbare panels
edit: forgot to put her contacts in ): the former sibyl has inverted irises and sclera. but i like both versions so you're getting both versions.
Hey it’s me again I wanted to show off my updated e1dols who I am calling Paprika and I wanted to ask if you could put her on your website with the description of “slowing down for protection”
HI AGAIN!! So happy to see her in shiny new digs, especially as one of the first e1dols made by others! digging the addition of stars in her eyes *_* (Here is her previous look if anyone is curious)
I have added her to the roster, let me know if anything looks funny o7
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hello these are some freaks i made. i really like e1dols and also ultrakill so i turned two of my favorite enemies into them
#1 -- "god is in the rhythm" / be not afraid, sinner
2 -- "no devil lived on" / i look like jesus, so they say - but mister jesus is very far away
they are based on the idol and deathcatcher respectively. they make me sad
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUYUGGHHHH THIS RIPS
i too am busting out of the stone puppeted by a traitorous heart, creepy and wet. jazzed out of my mind about these, thank you so much for sharing (and let me know if you would like them on the roster... because i certainly would like them on the roster... but no pressure aha)
"dreams with wings", "caped", "electric color", and "psychosymbiosis", made for my online friends!
"superstar", made for my IRL friend!
"i'll be your eyes", an e1dol one of my online friends (the one i made "caped" for) made for me!
"moon waltz", an e1dol made by the receiver of "caped" to protect the artemis II NASA mission!
.if you wanna put these on the roster, feel free! the former five were made by me (credit as edenmachine5457, you can link to my tumblr that i sent this ask with) and the latter two were made by the one who received the caped e1dol (credit as eyemoisturizer, with this link https://eyemoisturizer.nekoweb.org/)
.u can also make up ur own descriptions for these (if those are already made by you... i forgor. idk if those phrases are made by the people who submit them or by you) except for moon waltz its desc should be "perhaps we'll meet at tycho" (if you need descriptions i can reblog with submitted descriptions i made up!)
E1DOL DELUGE!!!!
My heart grew three sizes tonight! whadda hell!!!!!!!! I am so touched you jumped on using these little guys to brighten your friends' days... that;s what an E1DOL is made for... that's what it's all ABOUT
I also had to get up and go to the kitchen and white-knuckle the fridge for a minute because of moon waltz
gravity carrying our shared night sky carrying artemis ii carrying glover, wiseman, koch, and hansen carrying an unadulterated vestige of human curiosity and our inimitable desire to know the world. and if it makes it an iota lighter, we have a loadbearing e1dol to do some carrying too...
P.S. you and your friends are totally welcome to write blurbs for the little guys and send them my way! i am also happy to write blurbs for them if you don't want to, cryptic one-liners is my passion o7
