Only Thing That Comes To Mind Today.

there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.

today I used the phrase "breasting boobily" in casual real life conversation and everyone was shocked asking how I came up with that and I had to explain it. ive been at the devil's sacrament so long that I forgot he wasn't god

A CROCODILE, EATING

(Photo by Shuyi)

A CROCODILE, EATING is an installation work, ritual performance, and shrine.

It is part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, a contemporary visual art exhibition about tabletop roleplaying games, running at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK from now until 10 May 2025.

If you ask me to build a world, I will build a crocodile.

On linoleum flooring, stones are arranged into the shape of a saltwater crocodile. Embedded in the stones, on the crocodile’s back, are bowls, jars and platters of all kinds.

At the snout of the crocodile, on a rickety stool. At regular intervals, this printer noisily begins to print on coloured paper—stories about generational pain, family trauma, personal curses.

A printed notice reads:

The crocodile is kind. They love us. They eat our pain. Help them eat. 1. Take a sheet, read its prayer aloud. Help the crocodile understand. 2. Tear up the sheet. Help the crocodile chew; they have no more teeth. 3. Place the shreds of your sheet in a jar. Help the crocodile swallow. 4. If the jars overflow, wedge your shreds between the stones. The crocodile must swallow. 5. Thank the crocodile aloud. They are too full to reply. The crocodile is kind. They love us. We have so much pain. They must eat.

This crocodile has many origin stories:

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1. Lorn Song Of The Bachelor.

Specifically its cover. A loving and reverent tableau by Nadhir Nor, who presents the titular crocodile of the adventure as a sumptuous feast---each organ served on its own platter; spiced, wreathed in perfume; the meat arranged as both lingam and yoni, filled with flowers and water.

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2. Modern magic.

(Excerpts from my proposal doc for A CROCODILE, EATING)

Southeast Asian magical practice, when depicted in anthropological or art contexts, is often rendered in a particular aesthetic language, designed to read as authentic:

Black-and-white photographs. A woman in traditional clothes. Verdigrised bowls and platters and incense holders. Fresh-cut flowers. Muted, archaic, like a temple complex unearthed by archaeologists.

But magic as it is practiced today isn't like that. Curses are between feuding neighbours, in low-cost housing. They are cast in a flat, by a gig worker, with victims' faces printed by an inkjet printer with clogged nozzles.

Temples are painted in bright pink, lined with linoleum, beautified with artificial flowers, lit with white fluorescent tubes---affordable, long-lasting, bright.

Which bits of a ritual are essential, and which bits can you abridge? Can you cast a blessing over WhatsApp?

True magic and belief care more about being practical, than reading as authentic.

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3. The tomb at Pengkalan Kempas.

(Image source)

The tomb of Syeikh Ahmad Majnun, a 15th-Century saint, was used to swear oaths. At the foot of the tomb is a pillar, with a hole. You would place your hand in this hole, and speak your oath. If you spoke lies, the hole would close on your hand and crush it.

As shipping a whole oathstone to Nottingham wasn't practical, A CROCODILE, EATING is built from Cornish pebbles, bought from a garden-supply store.

Whatever works, you know? Again: magic is practical.

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4. Hang Tuah's footprint.

This shrine marked the spot where the Malay demigod Hang Tuah once stepped, thereby indenting the rock with his footprint.

It was used by locals: to ask for children, to ask for love, to ask for fortune. People would leave live chickens as offerings. (Nearby villagers would take these chickens home, to eat.)

Religious authorities destroyed the shrine some time in early 2023, on the basis that it promoted idolatry.

When I build a shrine I am always rebuilding the Hang Tuah shrine.

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5. Shrines as art.

(Image source)

Both Sharon and I have been thinking about shrines, lately.

We have come to see them as an artistic and political counterargument to national institutions, official religions, corporate IPs, platform monopolies---the exclusive franchises of power, money, and the state.

Despite nationalism’s efforts to centralise and clone a national identity, still we mutate, still we bootleg, still we graffiti, becoming once again ourselves. And—particular to post-colonial societies—in doing so we casually continue the work of liberation, sneaking the idea of freedom away from our own architects and elites and prime ministers, who would seek to seize its meaning for their own purposes. The churches or mosques or temples to demos that the federal government builds are ours to transform. To take from. To ignore. “No need. We’ve got our own shrines at home.”

Along with David Blandy, we made ShrineShare, an exhibition-in-a-folder of personal shrines by sixteen artists from around the world.

A CROCODILE, EATING is me sharing mine.

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6. Games as shrines.

(My home group, with custom T-shirts our GM Amanda made. Mine says: "Impostor Syndrome? Not In This Economy")

Tabletop roleplaying games resist dogma. As much you might like to appeal to RAW or Jeremy Crawford, play always and inevitably mutates to fit the mood and metre of your own table.

The rules system you use might furnish a set of cultural mores, an architectural vernacular---

But it is you and your players who actually make the game: your habits, your house-rules; your preferred procedures of handling particular situations; your in-jokes and callbacks and thematic fixations.

In play, a TTRPG is a shrine dedicated to your home game, a set of unique rites---always unique, always local, always small-scale.

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7. TTRPGs in galleries.

(Works by Scrap World, Amanda Lee Franck, Chris Bisette, Laurie O'Connel, David Blandy)

How do you present a roleplaying game in an art gallery?

I am no visual artist. I have no paintings or sculptures I can present, to transport visitors into a different world.

As a writer I mainly think in texts, narratives. I could have presented something narrative for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES: invited audiences to sit and play through an adventure; given them rules and characters and a scenario to play through.

Would've been unsatisfactory, though. While imaginative and experiential, such a work would not really have been visual. And TTRPGs take time---"sit down, participate for half-an-hour" time---which is a lot to ask, even of the most eager gallery visitor.

"Games as shrines" gave me a solution.

I'd make a shrine in the gallery. You'd play the shrine by performing some simple ritual actions. The shrine is tangible, made of stone and accompanied by a diffuser putting benzoin oil into the air. Its associated meanings and practices evoke a world, a cosmology.

You pray to the crocodile. The prayers are real and in earnest. You feed the crocodile. The crocodile changes with every prayer; as the exhibition continues the crocodile grows and is furred in colour.

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8. Pain.

None of the prayers you offer to A CROCODILE, EATING are fictional. All of them---stories of family loss; fraught relationships with parents, with homes; abuse, cultural misogyny, ethnic tension, toxic masculinity---are true.

Some of them come from my own life. At least half come from my friends, who shared with me their stories via THE CAT IS KIND, a prototype shrine I made a week before leaving for Nottingham.

You would ritually offer "a story that aches" to this cat-shaped piggy-bank, and the cat would eat that ache for you.

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9. Port Dickson.

Everything I make is ultimately about Port Dickson, the small Malaysian town in which I live.

Port Dickson is defined by its relationships to places across the sea. It is a town of petrochemical industry; exporting diesel and jet fuel abroad.

In return, from the First World, we received unwanted textiles by the container-load, in huge bundles---there are many "bundle" shops in my town, thrift stores essentially, where locals sort through the piles of discarded factory uniforms and fast fashion for still-usable garments to sell second-hand.

(Fun fact: all of the coats I wore in the UK I bought from the bundle!)

We fuel your civilisation, process your trash.

For A CROCODILE, EATING to embody my context it has to communicate the flavour of this relationship:

The shrine's rites do not allow gallery visitors to say their own prayers. You are only ever feeding the crocodile burdens imported from somewhere else.

The sense of an exhausted land, continually asked to take on more weight from without---growing more exhausted and strange, changing.

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10. Sincerity.

For this shrine to work it had to be real.

I took my shoes off whenever I stepped onto the linoleum. I prayed as I built the crocodile, stone by stone. Every time I entered and left the gallery space I faced my small, tired crocodile god, and I bowed to them, and believed.

I hope my belief makes the shrine real, and you feel this, if and when you visit, yourself.

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WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue (who are David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, and Jamie Sutcliffe), featuring works by:

Angela Washko

Andrew Walter

Amanda Lee Franck

Chris Bisette

Laurie O'Connel

Scrap World

Shuyi Zhang

Tom K Kemp + Patrick Stuart

Zedeck Siew

Adam Sinclair + Lotti Closs

At Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, until 10 May 2025.

it's funny although a little exasperating how artists designing "princess" or medieval-esque gowns really do not understand how those types of clothes are constructed. We're all so used to modern day garments that are like... all sewn together in one layer of cloth, nobody seems to realize all of the bits and pieces were actually attached in layers.

So like look at this mid-1400's fit:

to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got

chemise next to the skin like a slip (not visible here) (sometimes you let a bit of this show at the neckline) (the point is not to sweat into your nice clothes and ruin them)

kirtle, or undergown. (your basic dress, acceptable to be seen by other people) this is the puffing bits visible at the elbow, cleavage, and slashed sleeve. It's a whole ass dress in there. Square neckline usually. In the left picture it's probably the mustard yellow layer on the standing figure.

coat, or gown. This is the orange diamond pattern part. It's also the bit of darker color visible in the V of the neckline.

surcoat, or sleeveless overgown. THIS is the yellow tapestry print. In the left picture it's the long printed blue dress on the standing figure

if you want to get really fancy you can add basically a kerchief or netting over the bare neck/shoulders. It can be tucked into the neckline or it can sit on top. That's called a partlet.

the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.

Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:

tbh I have a trapeze dress from target that looks exactly like that pale blue one. ye olden t-shirt dress.

so now look here:

(this is a princess btw) both pieces are made of the same blue material so it looks as if it's all one dress, but it's not. The sleeves you're seeing are part of the gown/coat, and the ermine fur lined section on top is a sideless overgown/surcoat. You can tell she's rich as fuck because she's got MORE of that fur on the inside of the surcoat hem.

okay so now look at these guys.

Left image (that's Mary Magdelene by the way) you can see the white bottom layer peeking out at the neckline. That's a white chemise (you know, underwear). The black cloth you see behind her chest lacing is a triangular panel pinned there to Look Cool tm. We can call that bit the stomacher. Over the white underwear is the kirtle (undergown) in red patterned velvet, and over the kirtle is a gown in black. Right image is the same basic idea--you can see the base kirtle layer with a red gown laced over it. She may or may not have a stomacher behind her lacing, but I'm guessing not.

I've kind of lost the plot now and I'm just showing you images, sorry. IN CONCLUSION:

you can tell she's a queen because she's got bits I don't even know the NAMES of in this thing. Is that white bit a vest? Is she wearing a vest OVER her sideless surcoat? Girl you do not need this many layers!

Goths aren't "true to seed" in the sense that the biological offspring of two goths do not necessarily grow up to be goth, though inheriting the inclination for it from both parents increases the odds significantly. That is not how goths naturally reproduce.

The process is actually quite sophisticated, and requires the presence of a full-grown goth to trigger it. A pupal-stage proto-goth, at this point completely indistinguishable from any other small human child, only needs to encounter a mature specimen once - and while the initial imprinting that ensues will only take seconds, the incubation period often takes more than a decade, even several.

The first visible step of the transformation is triggered when the dormant goth suddenly gains awareness that they have free will and can do whatever they want with their appearance. While the progress may be gradual, or seem like the transformation happened all at once overnight, the initial seed was planted years ago. And now, in full bloom, a fully-fledged mature adult goth may finally be happy.

And that's why it's important to sometimes look goth as fuck in the grocery store. You might be seen by small child who had previously hoped to die before adulthood because everything they've heard about becoming a grownup is just pure misery, who will then consequently think to themselves "actually nevermind, that's what I want to be when I grow up."

Nothing beats a nice train ride in the countryside

When I die I wanna be resurrected as the crab in the bucket of crabs that pulls the other crabs back into the bucket. And I'll love doing it

put a finger down if you were just talking to your 70 year old dad and one thing led to another and you ended up having to sheepishly explain omegaverse and he was asking more and more questions so eventually you were standing with your face fully covered stammering out “a-and they go into… heat… cycles…” but he was still curious so now you’re listening to him read reddit posts about mpreg and yaoi aloud at your kitchen table