#deadly weapons

“Having resurfaced late in life due to a revival of her sex films, an eighty-nine-year-old Doris Wishman, clad in leopard print and wedge sandals, appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2002 … Born in 1912, a Jewish New Yorker and child of Ukrainian émigrés, Wishman was hardly ordinary. By the time of the Conan interview, which aired five months before her death, she had titillated and bewildered adult and cult film audiences for many decades with idiosyncratic movies rife with sexual degradation, grotesque and preposterous bodily perfidy, and, as one of her advertisements blared, “Girls without Restraint!” Among the most prolific American women directors of the postwar period, her vastly eccentric body of work, counting thirty features, remains unknown to many film connoisseurs … Entirely self-taught, she came to moviemaking as a widow in middle age, producing her first film, the nudist escapade Hideout in the Sun, with $20,000 borrowed from her sister Pearl. Before long, she was the biggest producer of nudist camp pictures, releasing eight in the early ’60s before shifting into black-and-white sex melodramas, or “roughies,” as the sexploitation mode adjusted to darker, more violent subjects and a grittier aesthetic inflected by noir, art cinema, and variants of realism … The pleasures of watching Wishman’s bawdy, crass, absurd, and kitschy skin flicks heighten across their proliferative form, as the gimmicks, stiletto heels, polyester curtains, ashtrays, vases, and black lace panties pile up from reel to reel.”

/ From “Who’s afraid of Doris Wishman?” by Elena Gorfinkel in Artforum, September 2022 /

The kitty saga continues. This time you get young (de-aged in a transporter accident? Genius that made it onto a flagship very young?? came along with his dad when he traveled because of work???) Spock and his feline behavior.

It’ll plant a kiss on your forehead wet with heat,

It’ll hold you at night and lay you to sleep,

It’ll paint reds and yellow and purples and fears,

It’s a stranger, it’s a ghost, it’s a lover, it’s a killer,

They only say the name in whispers and lies

IT’S A GUN IT’S A GUN IT’S A GUN

DEADLY WEAPONS LIVE ON ITCH

The new TTRPG from myself and @sublimemarch is out now! Deadly Weapons is a game about power, gender, trauma, desire, and hope. It is set in an urban fantasy world very similar to our own, but where underneath the surface Demons prowl and Avatars hunt. Players will create these Avatars, girls who one day had a gun arrive in their possession. A gun that cries in their dreams and never leaves their side. A gun which whispers in their ear that they must hunt and kill Demons. Demons are all around the Avatars, existing as classmates, bosses, or even romantic interests. But whether an Avatar fires their gun is up to them.

Deadly Weapons is a tabletop roleplaying game for about 2 to 6 players, including a guide. It is a hack of the [BXLLET> system by @rathayibacter, with a focus on atmospheric and narrative play. The game uses no dice or other randomizers. Instead, characters willingly take on various risks represented by the Avatars gaining Dooms and suffering fallout over the course of play.

Deadly Weapons is also a collage piece, made using at least 75% recycled or secondhand physical materials. The art, rules text, poetry, and fiction contained within this 32 page digital zine serves to inform your play.