Salutations earthlings and fellow people suit wearers! Put down your pumpkin spice lattes – we know, they’re good, enough already – and check out what we’ve stumbled across this week.
Bendytoots – Sick of Benedict Cumberbatch yet? Whatever your answer, Bendytoots by Hannah Krieger will make you laugh. That, or it will instill a sudden urge to collect prizes for the award-winning actor. Collecting endlessly because he is always watching, readers. Always.
Three Snake Leaves – Every time I read something by Vancouver artist Emily Carroll, I feel deeply unsettled. In a good way, though. Three Snake Leaves is her webcomic adaption of a Brothers Grimm tale, where a princess dies and her prince has agreed to be buried in the crypt with her. There isn’t a lot of interactivity, but you can choose the same outcome from two different perspectives. Carroll’s immense talent with the comic art form makes simple panels emotionally powerful depictions of characters. The characters never speak outright. Instead, their woe manifests in the imagery, the sentence hidden if you hover over, the slight changes in wording.
Zine library virtual meetup – Since stuffing all of the zine librarians in the world in one room would result in a catastrophic implosion of awesomeness, the zine libraries info group found a workaround. Anyone who works in zine libraries is invited to attend the Google + hangout next Tuesday, particularly “barefoot, do-it-yourself zine librarians that run homegrown operations.” Kick off your shoes and join them!
Inferno Cop – Imagine giving Japanese animators $20 bucks and telling them to make an anime. Inferno Cop is what they’d probably produce. Created by Studio Trigger, the small company who funded one of their upcoming works with Kickstarter, Inferno Cop’s lo-fi visuals, absurd plotline and voiceovers (the voice actors sometimes trip over words, like they just got their scripts five minutes prior) is a breath of fresh air from the usual big company otaku-pandering productions. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, listen to the ending. The butchered German song is likely the result of Google Translate gone horribly wrong.
Ladylike – Some games you just can’t win. In Nina Freeman and Emmett Butler’s Ladylike, you play Nina as she argues with her mother. Much like real life, anything you say will only disappoint your parent further. I liked how eventually your choices lead to one inevitable option and that both characters knew exactly what to say to rub off the other the wrong way. It’s a very realistic simulation of family power dynamics.