Author: Jon Ureña

Spanish writer, author of My Own Desert Places and We're Fucked. I have also written plenty of short stories and poetry, as well as two books in Spanish called Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho.

Review: GIGANT, by Hiroya Oku

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

This is a loose review of the entire series.

The main character of this tale (I wouldn’t dare call him the protagonist) is a sixteen-year-old high schooler that loves Western movies, that aspires to become a film director, and that is obsessed with a twenty-four-year-old half-Japanese, pink-haired, heavy-breasted porn actress who goes by a stupid artist name.

One day as he’s walking around in Tokyo, he comes across posted notices on which someone indicates that the porn actress lives nearby, which could lead a malicious person to harass her. The high schooler tears down the notices. The porn actress casually witnesses him doing so, and they strike up a friendship. Our main character can hardly wait to experience this gorgeous porn actress’ talents on his own flesh and dick, but she intends to put him in the friend zone. Besides, she has a boyfriend: an unstable gambler who beats her up when he remembers that other guys are fucking his girl. After they break up, our high-schooler main character and this big-breasted porn actress end up dating. Some people may have a problem with the fact that she’s twenty-four years old and he’s in high school, but the situation is far worse, because our main character is a toddler; the motherfucker threw a tantrum at a restaurant, bawling and all, until she agreed to date him. I have no clue what the author intended with that moment, but if he wanted the audience to lose all respect for the supposed main character, he achieved it.

Anyway, they work well as a couple: she’s motherly and loves to be needed, and he wants to screw as much as possible the most alluring woman to whom he has access.

Soon enough the tale delves into sci-fi: some weird guy is running around in his underwear while going on about some nonsensical stuff. Somehow he ends up getting struck by a truck. As he dies, he bequeaths to the porn actress a strange device that gets attached to her wrist, and she’s unable to remove it. Once the weird guy dies, he becomes a plush toy.

Our lovely porn actress figures out that the device allows her to become gigantic at will. At around the same time, a website named “Enjoy the End” grows popular: it lets users vote for what strange event they want to happen, and the most popular one becomes reality no matter how absurd: people start witnessing dragons and UFOs, and gigantic monsters descend from the sky to wreak havoc on Tokyo. The users of the website rejoice at the destruction that these manifestations are causing on the capital; most of the users seem to reside in the countryside. When they end up voting for a skyscraper-tall monster to reduce the population of Tokyo to one million, our porn actress decides to become the protagonist of this tale by turning gigantic and fighting the menace while naked (because the process of turning monstrously huge destroys her clothes, as well as anything else she happened to be in).

The story follows how Japanese society, then the rest of the world, reacts to the heroic deeds and growing cult status of the unlikely heroine who keeps exposing her monster-sized tits and genitals, and although the series becomes increasingly more ridiculous and absurd, this porn actress turned Godzilla-murderer remains brave and good-natured to an extent that warmed my black heart.

I don’t know if I can honestly recommend this series. I loved the graphic depictions of the big-boobed heroine, as well as how often she showed up naked. The fights are compellingly choreographed. This author has featured aliens in the three stories of his of which I’m aware: “Gantz” (I gave up halfway through when he killed off a main character, and I wasn’t enjoying it enough) and “Inuyashiki” (I appreciated the anime adaptation as well as its bold, violent nature, particularly the gun fingaz stuff). I wouldn’t be surprised if the author himself was an alien; he writes his human characters as if he’s only ever watched people from afar. However, I was most impressed with the quality of the drawings, which resemble renders based on photographs or 3D models, as well as with how balls-to-the-wall bonkers the whole thing is; I gotta admire the author for that. The two highlights that come to mind are the whole prolonged sequence involving a gargantuan Satan, and the two gigantic depictions of Socrates and Plato, who speak like teenage “Call of Duty” fanatics.

I had a good ol’ time reading this series. To be fair, I’d have a good time with pretty much anything that involves huge, meaty tits, so make of this review what you will.

Review: Wanitokagegisu, by Minoru Furuya

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas12 Comments

The title apparently translates to “Stomiiformes”, which is, according to Google, “an order of deep-sea ray-finned fishes”. This is the fourth series I’ve read of this author, after “Saltiness”, “Ciguatera” and “Himizu”. Furuya has become my third favorite author after Shūzō Oshimi and Inio Asano, and this series is my third most favorite of his.

The tale follows a thirty-two-year-old ugly loner who has been working the night shift as a security guard at a supermarket for seven years. A single event defined his youth: during a class in which the students were ordered to hold hands, everybody made a point of avoiding to hold the protagonist’s. Afterward the teacher berated his classmates for being so hurtful, but some girls rebelled and yelled that they didn’t want to hold his hand because he was gross and creepy. As soon as the protagonist became an adult, he went out of his way to avoid people and live as quietly as possible. However, we are introduced to him the moment he fears that he’s missing out, that he’s letting his life pass by. He has made a habit of going to the roof of the building at which he works, getting undressed to his underwear and running laps, but that night, as his anxiety grows, he makes a childish wish to the universe: for someone to become his friend.

Recently he had noticed that someone was spying on him from the shadows of a nearby apartment building as the protagonist ran laps on the roof. On top of that, some sneaky bastard starts leaving notes to him that state that the protagonist is about to go crazy and die before the end of the year. So far the only positive development in his life is that he meets his next door neighbor, who is a beautiful, tall, big-breasted young woman who aspires to become a published writer.

This story contains all the elements of a classic Minoru Furuya tale: an outcast protagonist who has trouble relating to people properly and who experiences intrusive thoughts; some of such thoughts are incarnated into creatures (humans and wild animals in this series, otherworldly “demons” in the other stories); silly humor; unpredictable behaviors; hardcore sequences that should have traumatized the involved characters but that end up having few lasting consequences; secondary characters that impact the protagonist as they play their role, but that then disappear forever; and the sense that by opening yourself up to others or even interacting with them, you are courting disaster.

Through the protagonist we meet a homeless gambler who’s running from the Yakuza; a wired young man who is in love with (and stalks) a dangerous woman; a pea-brained, big-dicked security guard who dreams of becoming rich and popular; a sociopathic hikikomori who murdered his depressive, alcoholic father; a possibly schizoid security guard who has never opened up to others and that if he does he risks finding out the extent of how fucked up he is; a gang of thugs who steal cars; an aging pleasure seeker who’s looking for a way to break up with her murderous Yakuza lover, etc. In the middle of it all, our unfortunate protagonist attempts in his fumbling way to improve other people’s circumstances, even to his detriment.

Most fiction writers, men and women, tend to dump plenty of their own flaws into their protagonists, then they also create romantic interests for those protagonists that in real life wouldn’t even deign to look at them. It rarely bothers me; after all, real life is shit and we ought to escape from it as often as possible. However, I had a especially hard time believing that a beautiful, tall, big-breasted aspiring writer would be interested in this story’s protagonist, who is ugly, unkempt, lacks any interesting hobbies or talents, has few social skills, works a dead-end job, and has never even kissed a girl. I did, however, like the character of that aspiring writer (who does very little actual writing in the story) although I couldn’t believe in most of her motivations. Her relationship with the protagonist becomes the spine of this story right up to the end, so if you can’t buy into it, you may have an issue with this series.

I have come to this story after I finished reading Furuya’s “Himizu”, a mostly serious work in which the author seemed like he was restraining himself from breaking into silliness. I much prefer the demented interactions between his characters that somewhat often end up involving sexual references and/or exhibitionism.

I’ve felt a kinship with this author ever since I started reading “Saltiness”, that remains my favorite series of his. In this story I’m reviewing, the author comments through his protagonist that he feels that his brain lacks something that would allow him to relate to other human beings as it seemingly comes easily to most other people, so naturally I suspect that he may also be autistic and in addition have OCD due to how often he depicts intrusive thoughts in his protagonists, who are often arguing with mental ghosts. So if you want to experience what a nightmare existing in such brains can be, I guess you could do much worse than going through this author’s works.

Random AI-generated images #2

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Once again I exploited a hapless neural network so it would render the nonsense that crosses my mind.

The neural network has learned that some artists sign their paintings.
I told the neural network to depict a demoness with a gun, and in a Victorian style. Good enough.
Gandalf discovers firearms. Why do you have three hands, Gandalf?
The pilot is supposed to be a penguin.
The two previous images depict Paleolithic people playing music.
The two previous images depict a presumably sentient Megatherium wearing a plague mask (and associated gear).
These two previous images depict a sasquatch roaming the post-Apocalyptic wasteland. I don’t know why that sasquatch is gigantic and has three legs. I hope that’s a leg.
I told the neural network to depict an orangutan doing ayahuasca in a cave. That’s not what it looks like.
A colossal llama ruining a town.
Alpacas fighting alongside colonial marines.
Cyberpunk alpacas.
Alpaca mugshots.
Demonic giraffe.
These two previous images were the neural network’s depiction of “an atomic explosion made of spiders”. Well played.
This neural network is way too good at rendering radioactive spiders. I could have kept asking for variants indefinitely.
These previous two images were intended to depict heavily armored dwarves fighting demons. In other news, “Dwarf Fortress” is supposed to come out in Q3 of this year.
This one was supposed to depict the burning of the Great Library.
These four previous images were supposed to depict the whole Atlantis deal as captured by Plato on his “Timaeus”.
A capybara discovers the secrets of the universe.
I pleaded for the neural network to render an image of Punpun and Aiko having a good time. If you know, you know.
A Japanese maid tragically losing her battle against spiders.
Live long enough to become the jello.

Review: Himizu, by Minoru Furuya

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas6 Comments

Minoru Furuya has become my third most favorite manga author after Shūzō Oshimi and Inio Asano, thanks to his series ‘Saltiness’ and ‘Ciguatera’. His stories follow underdogs whose mental peculiarities (OCD and autism are the most likely culprits for me) and shitty luck prevent them from realistically aspiring to anything better than an average life. The author consistently represents, in the three series of his that I’ve read, intrusive thoughts as strange, sometimes demonic entities that stalk the protagonist; I ended up doing the same thing for a novel of mine even before I knew about Furuya’s works, so this must be a result of how certain types of brains operate.

Anyway, the protagonist of this bleak series (by far the most humorless of the three) lives at a shack that also functions as a boat shop. It belongs to his father, but the old man bailed on his family to become a drunkard and a gambler. Now his teenage son has to run the business, because his mother is focused on finding a new husband.

The protagonist is fed up with life from the moment we are introduced to him. As he mentions a few times throughout the story, he knows he came from garbage and that he’s little more than a defective idiot. He tries to regulate his thoughts and actions so he won’t stray from the path that may lead him to live a regular, mediocre life, and he holds a grudge towards anyone who dares to pursue lofty dreams, as he believes that those people are delusional and blind to the fact that they are doomed to fall. He wishes to struggle and perform some grandiose good deed that would justify his existence, but he fears that as a broken person coming from a ruinous family, his destiny has already been decided.

One day his mother elopes with her new lover, never to be seen again. Our protagonist, deprived of parental support, decides to quit going to school and just runs his father’s boat shop. Soon enough, though, he comes to learn through a couple of Yakuza types that visit the boat shop that his father’s debts may become the protagonist’s responsibility as well.

As interesting characters other than the main guy we have the following: the protagonist’s only friend, an ugly, short, nearly toothless kleptomaniac who nevertheless isn’t as cursed as the protagonist because he doesn’t have the same perennially bleak outlook on life; an aspiring manga author who works as a counterbalance to the protagonist with his determined work ethic and confidence in his talent; and a reserved but tough female classmate of the protagonist who is attracted to him for some reason, and who wants to improve his miserable life.

This author’s characters, in the three series I’ve read of his, can often surprise you with their unpredictability. Some writers warn against using “and then” plot points; they suggest that every plot point must be a “but” or “therefore” regarding one or more plot points that came before. However, this author includes some sequences or scenes that in many stories would have long-lasting repercussions or be pivotal to the development of the plot, but in these stories life just goes on, or the important people fail to ever find out that the event happened. To put an extreme example, in one of the three series (won’t say in which), some secondary characters rape one of the main characters, but none of the main characters, including the victim, ever find out about it. On the topic of rape, there’s plenty of strange and/or sudden sexual stuff going on in this author’s works, even as mild as a character suddenly pulling his or her pants down, or fingering someone else. The violence included can often be equally sudden.

They made a live-action version of this story. Here’s the trailer. I haven’t watched the movie yet; apparently the director intended to follow the manga faithfully until the whole tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011 happened, so they included that in to offer some commentary and a more hopeful message than what this series supports. So far I can tell they made at least one change I consider questionable: in the manga the protagonist’s father was constantly in a drunken daze, but he was never overtly cruel nor dismissive towards his son; the protagonist despised his father because he abandoned his family, and after that point there was nothing the old man could have done to improve their relationship.

It’s a shame that I have already read the three series generally considered this author’s best.

Random AI-generated images #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

I had some fun exploiting the current Da Vinci of neural networks, mostly to produce silly combinations of elements. Because that particular neural network is a damn genius, I ended up with some masterpieces.

I obviously prompted the neural network to produce an image of a ghost playing the guitar; although not much of a guitar ended up in the image, I like the composition.
I wondered how a Megatherium would look if it were the star player of a soccer team.
These two previous images were the neural network’s answer to prompts related to the question, “what if horses were also firearms?”
I don’t know what is it with me and horses.
This was the cover I wanted for one of the two books I self-published in Spanish, and I paid a human to do a worse job.
This is supposed to represent a bunch of Roman soldiers fighting against a Lovecraftian monster in an underground chamber, part of my free verse poem ‘The Menace From Our Underworld’, that I’ve yet to revise for publication.
This was an accident; the neural network can’t quite tell apart an urchin from an urchin.
I prompted the neural network to put an elf in command of a plant-based UFO. I guess that’s technically a success.
These previous two images were the neural network’s answer to the question, “why the hell am I in a forest?”
These two previous images somehow ended up being produced as I was feeding the neural network moments of the 64th chapter of ‘We’re Fucked’.
These previous two images were the neural network’s answer to the prompt, “a demoness comedian on stage telling a sad joke”.
If these previous five images remind you of Beksiński’s stuff, that’s not a coincidence. I prompted the neural network to use that guy’s style, and it turns out that it has been trained on his paintings.
This image was a variation of the previous one, and I didn’t dare ask for more variations.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 64 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial4 Comments

My skin prickles, my muscles twitch, my bones ache. Every breath I take brings the aroma of pine resin into my lungs, and risks numbing them with cold. The breeze ruffles my hair and rustles the leaves of the thicket about six meters to my left. I’m having trouble discerning details in the undulating mesh of bone-thick branches and knee-high undergrowth, but I distinguish the pale silver tresses of moss that hang from upcurved branches, and that the bark of a few slender trunks has been clawed to reveal the rose gold tree flesh beneath. What abominations of nature may be lurking past the treeline?

I will keep my feet firmly planted on the rounded pebbles that are pressing into the soles of my feet. I will become a human statue frozen in time. Remain still: that was the lesson I learned back as I child when I got lost while my parents and I were strolling around Hondarribia. A plush monkey, dressed in a candy-red T-shirt and slutty shorts, was huddled inside the rusted cage of a vending machine. I was transfixed by his slack-jawed smile and the gleaming sadness in his oil-black eyes as he peered out at me from his gloomy lair, but I also admired that beast for having endured the life-long duty of dropping plastic balls in exchange for money, a drudgery that turned his fur dull and patchy. When I attempted to point the monkey out to my parents, they had vanished into the crowd.

For hours or days I sobbed as I tottered aimlessly past towering strangers. None of the passersby recognized my plight; I was just another unwashed urchin whose rags reeked of urine and vomit. Not even a dog offered its tongue to lick my wounds. How did that nightmare end up resolving itself? Maybe I never found my parents. Maybe that damnable monkey was the ringleader of a gang of human traffickers, and I have spent my life ever since chained to a bed in a pitch black basement.

Why was I thinking about that time I got lost in Hondarribia? Wait, why the hell am I in a forest?! My breath is steaming, the soles of my feet are throbbing. My fingers are curled into white-knuckled fists. The ripples of the brook to my right distort the rounded stones and twigs that its waters churn over.

I rub my eyes as if I were trying to claw out some filth.

“This isn’t happening,” I mutter to myself.

Jacqueline hammered into my head that hallucinations don’t open doors, so instead I must be experiencing a bout of psychosis. I shut my eyes tight and I retread in my mind the steps that brought me here. I entered the bathroom to take a shower; I must have opened the door of the shower cabin and stepped inside. I turn on the water, and from the showerhead a jet of ink-black, searing-hot liquid rushes out with a foaming whoosh to soak my hair and stream off my face. The liquid flows down the curvature of my breasts, the contours of my buttocks, the crooks of my knees; it trickles into the pink crevasse between my legs. I scrub shampoo into my scalp, then I pour gel on a sponge and wash away the stench of sweat, fear and guilt clinging to my skin. My mouth is full of lather that tastes of exotic herbs and berries, of tropical fruits and sugary nectar. When I finish showering, I have become as clean as the surface of the moon.

A prickly sensation is flitting across my fingers and toes as a numbness seeps into my muscles. The shivers are creeping into my spine, making my teeth chatter. Soon enough my pale skin will turn a glistening dark blue.

Am I waiting for whoever abducted me to appear? What else could it be but an unholy abomination?

A panicked mass of survival instinct kicks in.

“Wh-why the hell did you teleport me to a random forest, you otherworldly shitstains?! I would prefer that you showed up as I took a piss!”

From deep within the thicket comes a rumbling growl. My body goes rigid, my heart starts thumping like a war drum. I keep my eyes focused on the greenery, refusing to give in to the desire to blink.

Some branches rustle and a twig crunches in the treeline. A flicker of motion catches my eye. Through some breeze-stirred leaves I discern that a child is peeking out from behind a tree trunk. She must be about ten years old. Her disheveled hair is chestnut brown and reaches the shoulders of a crude, ash-colored leather tunic. She’s wearing a tooth necklace, bracelets made of twisted animal hair, and thick boots with fur collars. Her peach-orange skin is stained with dirt, and her slanted, monolid eyes are staring at me in surprise, maybe because she has never seen anyone like me, or because I’m naked in a forest. Is she another spirit who will ask me to sacrifice my blood to make up for the blighted land?

My legs are trembling, my nipples are hard as stone. I’m not sure how long this stand-off lasts while the branches sway in the breeze, the brook burbles and the birds chirp.

“H-hello,” I say in the warmest voice I can muster, “do I have the pleasure of addressing someone with an incredible command of the Spanish language? You can also speak in English if you want.”

The child’s jaw drops slightly, but she remains silent as she looks me up and down with wide-eyed wonderment.

“D-do you understand that I’ve been dumped into the wilderness,” I insist, “that I’m unclothed and freezing my tits off, that I’m mentally unbalanced, and that I’m in desperate need of help?”

From within the thicket comes a crackling noise as if sticks were snapping under the weight of a bear-sized creature. The child’s eyes dart between me and the thicket, then her lips move to say in a high-pitched voice a sentence that sounds like gibberish. She crouches and scuttles along the treeline until she hides behind a thicker tree trunk mottled with eggshell-white spots.

Dead leaves are crunching as they get crushed underfoot. I squint to peer through the web of greenery, and I discern that a looming shape is stirring the shadows and bending branches; some monster is lumbering towards us.

The cold has spread inward, and now it seems to radiate from my bones. My fingers and toes have gone numb, my thoughts are slowing down and my vision narrowing, but I control my ragged breathing. I beckoned this feral child over by shouting into the void, and if the monster that is about to emerge from the thicket devours her, I’ll endure the flashbacks for the rest of my possibly short life.

“H-hey, girl, over here,” I call her through my chattering teeth, and when we hold each other’s gaze, I gesture anxiously for her to approach me.

She hesitates; would I run towards a wild-eyed thirty-year-old woman who’s hanging out naked in the wilderness? The girl pushes herself off the tree she was hiding behind, then she scuttles on the pebbled riverbed over to me. A pungent odor wafts from her leather tunic, as if she had rolled around in grime and filth. She clutches my left hand. When I feel her warm, chapped palm, a dizzy spell threatens to overwhelm me. I have been snatched from Jacqueline’s apartment and dropped into a remote forest. What otherworldly horror will I encounter now?

The undergrowth behind the treeline shudders and jerks, a branch snaps, and from between two trees emerges a hulking, woody-brown quadruped. As its beefy right foreleg flattens a fern, beneath the shaggy fur, which is caked with mud, the muscles along its leg tremble, and the subcutaneous fat shakes up to the beast’s rounded back. Under its furry hands, the pebbles of the riverbed grind and clack together. I discern that the beast’s curved claws are the size of hacksaw blades; they could peel open my ribcage like pulling back the lid of a can of sardines.

As it heads to the rippling waters of the brook, the beast swings its elongated head towards us. The coarse fur of its face is swan-white except for the smoky-black patches that surround the sunken eyes. Its nostrils flare as it sniffs our scent, then it snorts and blows like a bull. The beast stops beside the brook and dips its chin in the stream to drink.

My brain is wrapped in barbed wire. What is this jarring cackling that is punishing my eardrums? Oh, it’s bursting forth from my throat. But why am I laughing?

The beast raises its head and looks straight at me as water drips from its drenched chin, then it turns around to face us. The feral child squeezes my left hand; even through my shrieks of laughter I realize that she’s trying to communicate with me, but I can’t decipher her jabber. That monster’s claws are churning up the pebbles as it stomps towards us. I catch a whiff of its musk, that smells of earth, loam and moss.

My throat closes up; the surge of laughter pushes against it, then desists and dissipates. I need to gallop away, but I must remain rooted to this spot or I will be lost forever.

The beast’s honey-colored eyes are aglow with bloody malice. As it bellows a thunderous burp, a plume of white-hot steam spirals out and a spray of hot spittle splatters onto my face. The nearby birds have scattered away in a panic.

The girl is tugging on my arm, my knees are buckling. This noble monster is waiting for me to kneel in worship; I’m a bug crawling around its feet. I should try my best to seem cool and aloof, like a woman with regular sexual appetites instead of like an insane shut-in who has been abducted.

“G-greetings, brave soldier of the forest,” I say in a quavering, hysterical voice. “I-I salute your service in the field of battle and I promise that if I live through this experience, I-I will surrender the best cut of my meat to you.”

The beast pushes itself off the ground to rear up on its hind legs, then it throws its head back to tower even further over me; a fearsome god looming over my puny body. Its mouth yawns cavernously. The muscles in the monster’s girthy torso, which is matted with clots of mud and leaf litter, bulge under the shaggy fur like taut, industrial-sized leather belts.

At the final moment of my dismal existence, I have an intense craving to make love.

The girl yanks at my arm hard enough that I tumble backwards, but before I land on the pebbles, a crackle of energy fills me, and my back hits a flat surface. I got the wind knocked out of me. As I prop myself up and take a big gulp of air, I realize that I’m at room temperature and that I recognize that pastel gray ceiling.

Someone kneels beside me. The smooth touch of silk caresses the skin of my shoulder, then the person seizes me, turns me around and buries my face in a pillowy pair of breasts.

“You’re back,” Jacqueline says in a strained voice racked with worry. When she wraps her warm arms around my trembling back, she recoils, then starts rubbing my skin vigorously. “Baby, you are freezing!”

I’m shaking from the cold and the adrenaline surge, but now that Jacqueline’s breasts have enveloped my face, I will heal quickly.

“D-don’t worry,” I mumble through her cleavage.

A childish utterance of confusion behind me causes Jacqueline to stiffen up.

“Leire,” she whispers, “who the hell is this girl?”

I unstick my mouth from the silky skin of her breast to glance over my shoulder. The feral child is sitting on her knees and squinting at the bright light in the hallway as she checks her surroundings with bewilderment.

Author’s note: the two songs for today are ‘Sapokanikan’ by Joanna Newsom and ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who.

From all the chapters that remained to write of this novel, this one I looked forward to the least; I suspect that I didn’t believe I could pull it off. But it came out good enough for me, so the ride should be smoother from now on.

That story about Leire getting lost in Hondarribia as a child because a monkey distracted her happened to me. They eventually found my bloated corpse washed up on a beach.

In case you missed it, I exploited the services of a neural network that runs on a supercomputer to generate images that depict moments of this scene. Here is the link.

I usually get 8-10 visits a day on my site. Less than 24 hours ago, someone from the US racked up about 170 hits. That person even went through entries of the fanfiction of ‘Re:Zero’ I wrote a couple of years ago. I never liked ‘Re:Zero’ that much; I preferred my darker, crazier spin on that story. I worked on it during a turning point in what passes for my career as a writer; I had ceased to read anything in Spanish, my own native language, and I didn’t want to write in Spanish anymore even though I had self-published two books in that language, but I felt like I could never become proficient enough at writing in English. Working through those sixty or so chapters of fanfiction changed my mind, and I had a blast throughout.

Anyway, thank you for checking out so many pages of my site, whoever you are. I hope you were entertained.

AI-generated images of Leire from ‘We’re Fucked’

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

I’m still two-fifths of the way through the last draft of the 64th chapter, but I have been sending prompts to the neural network that generates images on some supercomputer; it merely requires me to input a sentence. So here are some depictions of Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel.

This one is so ‘Uzumaki’ that the neural network must have been trained on Junji Ito’s works; I merely included ‘falls in spiral through a vortex’ as part of the prompt

As a bonus, here’s a portrait of Spike’s decapitated head:

We’re Fucked, Pt. 64: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

I have finished the first draft of the next chapter of my ongoing novel, but as I was working on it I kept generating images with the neural network that runs on a supercomputer, feeding it prompts about the images I had in my head. The results have been interesting, and some horrifying.

Although chapter 64 isn’t out in the wild yet, maybe this sequence of images can work as an intriguing teaser. Probably in the future I will only post an entry with all the related images after I’ve uploaded the corresponding chapter, though.

EDIT: here’s the link to chapter sixty-four.

Although the bunnyman doesn’t show up in the next chapter, I made the unforgivable mistake of asking the neural network to generate images of him. No wonder Leire behaves likes she does.

I don’t want to end this entry on such a note, so here’s a generated picture of Jacqueline:

State-of-the-art AI-powered image generation

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

I came across a paid service that allows you to take advantage of trained neural networks that run on supercomputers and are specialized on generating images. So far I’ve been busy for a couple of hours generating masterpieces like the following:

A new banner for my site
Harelactal, the sasquatch goddess from a poem I wrote

A very unflattering portrait of Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel ‘We’re Fucked’

Needless to say, as long as I have the time and I can pay for such services, I’m going to generate images for my chapters and poems from now on.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 63 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

“No, I don’t want breakfast!” I shriek.

I have sat bolt upright on a mattress. The bedsheets are puddled around my waist. I’m panting, my heart is racing in my throat. It feels like the bed is rocking back and forth like a ship at sea. Although sweat is dripping down my face and naked torso, a frigid lurch runs through me and I almost vomit.

An insidious force is slithering inside me while my head buzzes with thoughts like flies trapped inside a jam jar. My mind is a pile of detritus rusting in a fetid puddle of gunk. A single tear is trailing down my cheek, and I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb. Once again I wish I would become a catatonic mute lost in my pitch-black depths.

To my left, a weight depresses the mattress, then a warm arm drapes around my tits.

“You’ll be all right now,” Jacqueline whispers. “Lie down, baby girl.”

Her soft voice soothes my frail bones and tattered mind. I slump backwards until my head sinks into the pillow.

Jacqueline cuddles up against me, squeezing her breasts against my naked chest and wrapping her long legs around mine. Her hair is tickling my neck, and her lips are playing over the skin of my jaw as she breathes warm air into my ear. The heat that radiates through her smooth, silk-blend robe makes my despair dissipate like a noxious stench. Second by second, a quiet descends upon me like in the wake of an orgasm.

A blinding white light pierces the dark behind my eyelids in a jolt of anxiety. What the hell am I worried about now? Ah, we have to go to work in the morning. When I reach to the nightstand for my phone, Jacqueline’s half-lidded gaze meets mine in the mirrored wardrobe. In the pale moonlight that streams through the balcony door, Jacqueline’s skin is glowing with a silvery luster, and her cobalt-blue eyes are shining like gemstones. She embodies the serenity of the ocean on a clear day.

I hold my phone up and check the time while the device glows bright.

“A quarter past four,” I say in dismay.

Jacqueline sighs and tenses her thighs around mine.

“Three hours more and we’ll be forced to leave our bed.”

I place the phone on the nightstand, then I stare up at the shadowed space between two hemispherical lamps on the ceiling. Jacqueline runs her fingertips over my right cheek as she nuzzles up against the crook of my neck. My nipples tingle, the hairs of my nape stand on end.

“That previous shout of yours must have woken up the neighbors,” she says casually.

I guess she wants me to open up about my nightmare. I should apologize for having disturbed her sleep, but I have spent my whole life apologizing for my shortcomings.

“These nightmares…” I start in a weary voice. “I feel like I’m becoming increasingly attuned to stuff… to which I shouldn’t be privy.”

“Such as? What terrible vision has tortured my baby this time?”

My face involuntarily contorts into a grimace as I attempt to repress a shiver of disgust.

“That filthy, maggot-infested scumbag,” I spit out.

“I suspect that for you those words could describe many people, including yourself. Are you referring to the bunnyman?”

My tongue feels like a slab of leather as I swallow the word that conjures up his horrifying visage in my mind’s eye.

“That monster… was robbing a bank, but he slipped on some leaves and fell down, cracking his head open, spilling his blood on the carpet. In the middle of the crimson pool was an envelope, and when I opened it I found that it contained a letter addressed to me. The bunnyman wanted me to know that he’d be keeping me company until the end of time. He also invited me to a rabbit ranch that he owns.”

My voice sounded raw and raspy. Jacqueline’s left arm tightens around my ribs.

“And I guess that at some point someone offered you breakfast. He did a number on you, that well-endowed devil.”

I take a deep breath, then I rub my eyelids. I’m a baby lying helpless in an oversized crib surrounded by monsters. They have smudges of grease on their faces, they’re wearing rags that hang off them like flappy skin, their bellies are bulging with foul produce. They keep snorting lines of white powder off rusty spoons. Soon their bloated fingers will dig into me like grubs into a rotten corpse.

“When I was five,” I whisper in a fragile voice, “I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, my first one ever. Some soft, fleshy thing was coiled around my ankle. I jumped from the bed and ran to my parents’ room, because they were supposed to protect me from bad dreams, but when I opened the door I realized that the fleshy thing coiled around my ankle was my father’s balls. He was sleeping on his back, and they were hanging out of his boxers as he snored like a donkey.”

Jacqueline gasps, then her left arm cradles my head and pulls me in for a kiss on my forehead.

“Oh no, you are getting like that again. Shush, doll. Just fill your mind with sunny things.”

My eyes are wet with unshed tears. My voice chokes.

“This world is a cold lake whose edges are shrouded in mist. The decapitated heads of everyone I’ve ever met bob on the water, and in the ripples they cause I glimpse my own reflection. I wonder if after death we are dumped into a desert of shiny black obsidian, a labyrinth made out of the most bitter thoughts.”

Jacqueline presses a kiss against my lips, which shuts me up.

“I have no clue what you mean,” she coos, “but I’ll share something that I’ve daydreamed about recently: how about you and I go, soon enough, on a holiday to some Caribbean island? We would stay in a cute bungalow for a couple of weeks. Imagine yourself standing beside the ocean with your feet in the sand and your hair waving in the warm breeze. Think of the sunlight filtering through the palm fronds and casting golden ripples on the blue waters as they lap against the shore. The waves will wash away your despair with their frothy, salty foam. We’ll laze on a hammock while we watch the setting sun turn the horizon into a blazing spectacle. We’ll fuck as the night sky glitters with uncountable stars.”

A wave of relief is washing over me when Jacqueline gives my neck a lick with her hot tongue, and now a tingling sensation is building in my pelvis. I close my eyes and breathe in her heady scent. In the theater of my mind, the water of a tropical sea splashes our naked feet. We’re sitting in a cave hollowed out of the rock by the crashing waves. A pillar candle casts an eerie glow over the grotto that Jacqueline has transformed into a cozy bedroom, with pillows and soft sheets that the sea has delivered to us. The pounding of the surf deafens me in the tiny space, and my skin is feverish from the humid heat.

When I open my eyes, I remain caked in the stale sweat that the bunnyman induced.

“That sounds idyllic, although I’d have to shave my armpits first,” I say with a shy smile. “I’d also have to trim the green scum coating my soul. But no way such a positive development could happen to me. Our plane’s engines would malfunction and we would plummet to the ocean.”

“We wouldn’t travel in a plane, silly. I’ll book a private cabin on a luxury cruise ship.”

“When we get to the island, I’ll fall into an open manhole. If we arrive at the resort, I’ll get violently sick and vomit all over the bar area. The tropical sun will render me as black as charcoal. I’ll offend a massive German man, a giant who will shatter my collarbone with a single punch, then he’ll dump my remains onto a beach and spit on my corpse. While I’m lying in bed, I’ll wet the bed.”

Jacqueline’s tits tremble against mine as she giggles.

“Oh my sweet darling, you are a complete nincompoop sometimes. Such horror stories will do nothing to dampen my enthusiasm about that dream vacation. When we get to the island, I’ll make sure you drink lots of water so that you don’t get sunstroke. If you have to leave the shade for even a minute, you’ll be made to wear a hat so that you don’t burn your precious head. I promise you won’t experience any mishaps like that, none whatsoever. I’ll treat you as if you were made of porcelain.”

“I still believe in the ghoulish prophecies I’ve dreamed up for myself.”

Jacqueline caresses my face with both hands.

“A nap will dislodge you from your current state of mind.”

I envision a cruise ship exploding in a gigantic fireball.

“Yeah, I don’t know how I would tolerate eight hours of work with all this madness in my head.” I push myself up, and when Jacqueline rolls onto the mattress, I sit on the edge of the bed. “But first I have to wash the filth off my skin.”

Jacqueline stretches like a cat in the sun.

“I like that humid, musty smell, though,” she purrs.

“So do the sweat-eating bacteria.”

I yawn widely. When I slide out of bed and plant my soles on the lukewarm hardwood floor, I’m weighed down by exhaustion. I shamble towards the hallway as Jacqueline’s gaze warms up my naked ass.

“Please, don’t let any horses in the bathroom,” I say over my shoulder.

She chuckles at my request, which is further evidence that I’m not human.

“If you see any, yell and I’ll shoo them off with a broom.”

The moonlight shines through the acid-etched glass of the bathroom window, and its luminous image gets reflected in the door of the shower cabin. When I reach to switch on the light, a crackle of energy fills me. I’m engulfed in cold air as if I stepped into a walk-in refrigerator. As I blink away the whiteness that has blinded me, I feel that cool, muddy pebbles are pressing into the soles of my feet, and a couple of sharp edges are digging into my flesh. I hear a burbling brook and the twittering of birds. The air is crisp, and rich with the primeval smell of a forest.

I’m standing on the sedimentary rocks of a riverbed. To my right, the wavy surface of a brook is slate grey where it reflects the overcast sky, and otter brown where it reflects the other bank of the stream. At that woodland edge, the slender, swan-colored trunks of trees with orange-yellow canopies dominate, but above them protrude the brown, pointed tops of pines like lance tips. Beyond a forested hill I glimpse the ice-capped peaks of a mountain range.

About six meters to my left, leafy ferns sway gently in the breeze at the edge of a thicket three-stories tall, in which the trees blend into a patchwork of deep greens and onyx-black shadows. A bird flutters overhead as it wings out of the canopy and traces an arc across the grey riverbed, which is strewn with branches and leaves.

I’m frozen in place, and my eyes dart back and forth between the thicket and the rippling brook. My breaths are shallow. Goosebumps are forming along my back as the cold creeps up my spine and seeps into my toes and fingers.

I turn my head slowly to look over my shoulder. Twenty meters away, the grey riverbed gives way to knee-high grasses and thick bushes, and the brook bends between pines and threadbare canopies.

Author’s note: three songs for today, which are ‘Island In the Sun’ by Weezer, ‘Cut Connection’ by Jesca Hoop and ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane.

These last couple of days I’ve felt better. Maybe the black beast has gotten tired of my cowardice, and it has wandered off until the next time it deigns to visit me again.