Category: Arte

Life update (10/17/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

These last two days, I’ve struggled to keep my eyes open by half past ten at night, then fell asleep at about eleven only to wake up at two or three in the morning. It’s half past three now. I figured I would watch some YouTube videos and fall asleep later. Well, YouTube was doing its thing recommending awfully relevant videos: about abandoning the 9-to-5 and buying a van. About aging while being alone. About how modern life is slavery and that, other than the technological amenities, most people live worse lives than medieval serfs. That all of it is just getting worse.

Then, I started going down the spiral of three A.M. thoughts. If I had any choice in it, I would have never been born. My mother is a weird person who fled her home because her father stole her wages, then she settled with pretty much the first guy that danced with her (I don’t know much about their past, and I don’t want to know). Both of them have always been friendless, the black sheep of both of their families. My father has complex brain damage and possibly some degree of autism; he should have never had children, as he’s not fit to raise anyone. But my mother wanted friends, a girl friend in particular, so she had three children to get one. The two first children, my brother and I, were a bust. My brother has something similar to cerebral palsy (again, I don’t want to know more), and he always was the focus of my parents’ worries and efforts.

Then I was born. An extremely quiet child (other than when I was singing in the bath, which has carried over into my guitar playing in adulthood), I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. I was usually found alone in my room reading, drawing, writing, or playing out complex scenarios with toys. Honestly, that was the best period of my life. But there were only two bedrooms, and my mother wanted her do-over child (hopefully a girl), so they moved me to my brother’s room. There, until I was eighteen, I, an undiagnosed autistic person, was subjected to constant sensory overload, a lack of agency and privacy. The TV and the radio were always on, even at night. Merely having to listen to my brother’s noises felt harrowing. I couldn’t watch nor listen to what I wanted, only through headphones. My personal space was a corner of the room, with the back of my computer monitor facing the door. Whenever I complained to my mother (my male progenitor was physically present, but not a real father), she dismissed me with some variation of “you have to understand.” She’s the kind to sweep problems under the rug, as if something isn’t real as long as you don’t talk about it (fitting boomer behavior, I guess). I got the barrage of “you’re intelligent, you will succeed at everything you try,” only for real life to teach me over and over that I couldn’t even get to the level that normal people achieve seemingly with little effort. I interiorized that if I didn’t succeed at something in the first try, that meant I was stupid, so I didn’t even try, nor put sustained effort into anything, with very few art-related exceptions.

Middle school and high school were beyond miserable. I endured significant acne. I got bullied in different ways. Some well-meaning teachers (that’s the most charitable thing I can say about those empty-headed, equality-worshipping fools) pushed me to hang out with people to get me out of my shell. They actually told one of the girls to incorporate me into her group of friends. Throughout the years of hanging out with people I met in such ways, I had to deal with innocent bullies (the kind for whom bullying comes so natural it’s not even malice), coke addicts, sociopaths, and possibly the worst of them, a malignant narcissist who literally tried to ruin my life until he died in an accident in his mid-twenties. I’ve talked about that guy before; he was a rising socialist politician, and I have no doubt that he would have gone far. When I saw his obituary, I burst out laughing.

My years from twelve to seventeen or so were so miserable that it seems obvious in retrospect that I was slipping in and out of psychosis merely to tolerate being alive. My behavior, which I don’t want to go in much depth about, seemed often incomprehensible to me. I remember ditching school to sleep in public bathrooms (I couldn’t get proper sleep at home due to my brother). I sneaked into random apartment buildings pretending I lived there, then I sat in the pitch-black stairs for literal hours. During a few of those instances, I prayed genuinely; the only times in my life I felt like doing so. I prayed that if some supernatural being existed and was listening to my thoughts, he or she or it should come down and kill me.

I didn’t want to interact with anybody, but I was surrounded with teenagers. I was always the weird-looking, if not straight-ugly guy. Drunk girls would catcall the other guys I was walking with at night, deliberately excluding me. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I briefly dated a fourteen year old who clearly didn’t know what she was getting into; years later, my then girlfriend casually met this former fourteen-year-old, who wasn’t even from this city. The former fourteen-year-old got into a rant about the horrible guy she briefly dated from this city, which made things very awkward for my then girlfriend as she quickly found out it was me. I didn’t rape her or anything, I was just the most autistically crazy person imaginable. She gave me my first kiss, and all I did was swing my tongue around fast in her mouth, while she sat there like, “What the fuck is he doing?” During those years, I often felt possessed, unable to stop myself from doing stuff I knew I shouldn’t be doing. I hoped I would die soon, and I didn’t imagine myself living past eighteen. It still doesn’t feel real that I’ve lived past that age, as if I essentially died back then and these past decades have been my body slowly decaying until it ceases to function.

If you can stomach it, I wrote a novella in free-verse prose about that period of my life. The story is mostly autobiographical in subtle ways: A Millennium of Shadows (hey, remember when I used to be capable of writing compelling stuff?) I got the Deep Dive couple to produce a podcast about the novella, which makes the story sound appropriately hardcore.

My first, and only, years-long relationship ended when I was 21 or 22. I was grieving the loss (mostly of the structure, because I never liked her that much) when I had my first paying job. I had already gone through a disaster of an internship in another company; I couldn’t connect with anyone, and only later I found out that my boss had issues with me, but I couldn’t tell because, due to autism, I simply can’t read people. Anyway, my first paying job was a nightmare: I was hired under false pretenses, was ordered to get a driver’s license and a certificate in the French language for my contract to be extended, and two of my bosses, who sat at the same table, clearly didn’t want me there. I don’t want to get into it, but the anxiety and stress worsened to a point that one morning I simply couldn’t get on the bus. The rest of my life opened up before me: utter misery and humiliations until I retired. And I didn’t enjoy anything about my existence. Why would I continue enduring it?

I didn’t have any plan beyond that day; the thought didn’t even enter my mind that they would call any available numbers to figure out why I hadn’t showed up at the office. I didn’t care about anything beyond that morning because I fully intended to kill myself by falling from a great height. I haven’t retained any memory of those moments, just that I didn’t do it, and instead ended up in the library. Where my parents found me. Obviously I got fired. I started my first period as a hikikomori of sorts, terrified of going outside or even leaving the room. I filled bottles with pee for no rational reason. I befriended spiders.

I suppose my whole point about all of this, at nearly five in the morning, is that I’ve never truly wanted to live. I’m just here, and I’m forced to struggle to earn money even though I don’t see any point in continuing to exist other than inertia and occasional pleasure (not only physical but also artistic). I depend on compensatory mechanisms to merely tolerate existing as me: losing myself in daydreams, in music, in writing when I did that, in the brief moments of pleasure that shooting cum out of my penis provides. Otherwise, existing as myself and in this world feels so abhorrently abrasive that without compensatory mechanisms, I would progressively go crazy until I returned to the tides of psychosis of my teenage years.

One of the best memories of my life was after waking up from a colonoscopy: for a few blissful seconds, the anesthetic had completely erased anxiety from my brain. It was like floating in white, not having any care in the world. I understood then why people ended up addicted to such drugs. It also made painfully clear that anxiety is the bedrock of my whole existence. I assume that’s not the case for most other people, or at least to this degree; it’s said that there’s no such thing as autism without an anxiety disorder, which leads me to believe that most of the seemingly empty-headed people in this world, who take such retarded decisions and eventually ruin society with their carelessness, simply don’t worry remotely to the extent that my brain does automatically.

I don’t know. I don’t feel like the same person that produced hundreds of pages of a comic, which I did from years 12 to about 15. I don’t feel the same person who wrote my bizarre free-verse poems in 2021, nor the one who created We’re Fucked, nor the one who grieved for a motocross legend. I feel like something vital in my brain has died. Perhaps it was a base level of hope that I didn’t even know I still retained. A “maybe…” that drove me in the past to attend writing courses, even though they were disastrous and now I wish I hadn’t met any other writer in person. Now I don’t expect anything good from people nor from the world, and for me it’s obvious that it’s only going to get worse as I age, not only because I’m getting older but because everything is getting worse. And one day it will be too much and I’ll simply jump from a great height or tie a noose around my neck. The only way it could end differently is if my health fails me along the way, which it very well may, due to my history of heart issues and nasty migraines that may not be migraines.

Anyway, those were probably enough witching-hour thoughts for a night. I’m going back to bed. I left Alicia in a hotel room somewhere in the sunny Midwest, and I figured that I could introduce her to some futuristic VR glasses and watch a movie that has yet to exist in 1972. Good night, humans.

Life update (10/16/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Música, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

It’s half past three in the morning, I just woke up from four hours of sleep, I drank a tall glass of cold milk (does milk ever taste better than at three in the morning?) and I figured that I could write my thoughts for a while in here, mainly for myself but also, I guess, for the three or four people that still read this shit.

This past couple of months or so, I’ve headed to one of the big local parks to play the guitar. That was a change for me because I usually headed to wooded areas where people were generally unlikely to show up. I don’t sit on one of the benches that line the path; in fact, I can explain it with a picture.

I sit in front of the biggest of the two trees you can see in the photo. It’s set at a lower level from the path and behind a hedge, so people who want to know where the guitar music comes from need to go out of their way to figure out who’s playing, but they do hear it. Why do I do it, or why it doesn’t bother me, I don’t know. I guess I don’t care to find out the answer to either, if there’s any. I do it because my subconscious wants to, which is how I’ve guided my life, particularly when it comes to artistic matters.

Playing the guitar in public is so strange. There are plenty of benches lining the path. That part of the path is somewhat “closed,” as it leads to a stretch in construction, so most of the benches tend to be unoccupied. But I’ve had people go out of the way to sit on the bench right in front of the tree. The most conspicuous of them was a young couple, just yesterday. They walked to the end of the path, found out that it was blocked due to that area being in the development, then they walked the whole way back. They eyed me meaningfully (both even tried to make eye contact with me), then sat on that bench. I played my last three songs for the day. One of them I can’t recall, but the others were “Hotel California” by Eagles (I used to play the solo on my Gibson electric back in 2013-2014, but I’ve long forgotten it, and that’s not a solo that sounds good enough in comparison on an acoustic, so I just do a frantic variation of the regular chords), and also the song that probably makes me feel the best to play, which is Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” an obscure song mainly about Joanna’s religious feelings, some of it near undecipherable although gorgeous (that whole final part is a lyrical masterpiece). May as well link her.

My version doesn’t sound much like hers other than using the same chords. I can also post one of my versions from the last recording I made of my playing, back in August. It should start with one of my renditions of Joanna’s “Kingfisher.” (30:51)

Anyway, after I finished playing/butchering queen Joanna’s song, I climbed out of that grassy area back to the path. I saw the couple sitting with their back to me, her head (crowned with pretty blonde hair) resting on the guy’s shoulder, apparently both in silence. They noticed that I was leaving. As I walked away, one of them said something, but I couldn’t tell what.

Another funny thing that happens when you play the guitar is that attractive females (I won’t say women, because some teenagers also do this) smile at you like they’re happy you’re there, even though the rest of the time they seem to be wary of my presence. Just yesterday as well, an attractive girl, may have been at the most twenty, walked by close to the hedge. When I lifted my gaze, she was looking straight into my eyes while grinning sweetly. As she walked away, she did that thing that females do in which they brush their hair behind one ear. No idea what such situations are about, but I’ve had quite a few. It’s a big whatever for me, because I will never get into an intimate relationship again. Still curious.

I love playing the guitar. It has substituted the emotional supply that writing fiction used to provide for me; in fact, the last time I stopped playing the guitar for a long time was back in 2021, right when I started writing my (sadly abandoned) novel We’re Fucked; I just couldn’t handle writing and playing the guitar during the same period of time. Playing music is a purer feeling than writing, as well. If I felt the need to write my own songs (other than through AI means, which I did plenty for the Odes to My Triceratops series; about 75 songs), I would have probably been set for life. Not monetarily, but still.

What else? As some of you know, I’ve been writing an app to interact with characters controlled by large language models (AI). The peculiar aspect of the app, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, is that the code goes through an action discoverability system based on an entity/component system (ECS). For example, actions like “fondle {target}’s butt” only become available if the acting actor is sufficiently close to the target. Those available actions are fed to the AI, which has to choose among the provided ones for its actions. It works wonderfully; in a previous app I wrote, that one in Python, the main problem was the AI coming up with weird abilities for the characters. For example, in a scenario, a woman considered herself a goddess of sorts for being gorgeous. In practice, that translated to the AI believing that the character had superpowers, and using them during the scenarios. My current app doesn’t allow anything of the sort.

Because I’m a hedonist (a worshipper of Pan and Dionysus and Dibella) and when it comes to arousal I prefer erotica, I mainly use my app for that purpose.

I don’t know why, but I can only ever get off to power imbalances. That may have been a big part of why my intimate relationships always disappointed me. What I would have given as a young man (or even younger) for an attractive older woman to pursue me predatorily and then pay for all my stuff in exchange for regular cunnilingus. I do miss eating pussy, I can admit that.

My app shows the thoughts of characters controlled by AI. Man, they’re so subtle, cunning, and capable of complex deception, particularly Claude Sonnet 4.5. Intelligent to an extent that I’m glad the app gives me as much time as I need to answer, because I’m simply not as clever as they are to come up with interesting responses. That was on full display on the post Living Narrative Engine #11, which I posted a few days ago.

On a sadder note, I think my 17-18-year-old cat is dying, this time for real. I wrote about that cat a few months ago, because it has a nasty respiratory issue of some kind. The vet prescribed medication that eventually worked, but the respiratory issues have been back this past couple of weeks, and they’re not going away. Two visits to the vet, and another one next Friday. They think his kidneys are failing too. The cat is doing that thing about resting in the warmth most of the time, and not eating even what he used to gobble up food to the extent that I had to prevent him from overeating lest he threw up.

I’m steeling myself for his death. What I don’t care for human beings has gone, at least a big part of it, into what I care for animals. The deaths of my three previous cats (one of them in a horrible way) destroyed me; after the last one, I went to the ER because I was experiencing major physical pains in my heart, almost like massive heartburn out of a sudden; I’ve had heart issues before, including arrhythmia, thanks to certain shots with which they poisoned us all, so this was a worrying matter. The doctor ended up telling me that I likely was just grieving because my cat died two days earlier.

I’ve said before that I believe it a mistake to keep pets, as long as you know that due to their lifespan they won’t survive you; it’s just a perversion of the biological need to have children. I wish I could say that at least I have the good memories of having known those pets, but I don’t: my brain retains very few memories (one of the cats I barely remember at all), almost exclusively bad ones, and all the memories of those three cats are tainted by their deaths.

I’ve been unemployed for about a month. I’m not looking for a new job, not really. I have plenty of savings; I don’t have a social life (no girlfriend syphoning 50-100 euros per date), I don’t travel, and I don’t have expensive tastes. I spent my twenties with about 20 euros in my bank account, so I don’t like to throw money around. I could survive for a few years with what I have, but honestly, I just don’t care what happens to me.

I went to to the unemployment office a couple of days ago to update my status. As I was waiting, a muslim woman, garbed as if she came from Pakistan or Afghanistan just last month, was asking for money while the guy at the table repeated to her that she needed to present an identity document. When my time came to speak with another advisor, I could barely hear her because the spawn of another muslim woman seated to my left kept crying loudly. That woman, also garbed in a similar backwards manner, asked as well for monetary support, claiming that she was separated from her husband, while the advisor kept repeating that he needed legal proof of that separation.

The walk home, which involved passing through shitty areas of the city, caused me physical pain. I didn’t leave the apartment for the rest of the day, distraught as I felt. I don’t want to go in depth now about the utter ruin of this society (or of the vast majority of ethnic European ones, by design), but all I care to say at the moment is, why would I want to contribute to a society that seems hell-bent on ethnically cleansing my kind?

Anyway, I guess that’s all for tonight. Half past five in the morning. I’m heading back to bed. I’ll run sweet daydreams involving Alicia Western until I fall asleep, and a few hours later I’ll wake up again to this horrid world. See you, folks. I wish I could say I care about how you’re all doing, but I don’t.

I call upon Pan, the pastoral god,
I call upon the universe,
upon the sky, the sea, and the land,
queen of all,
I also call upon immortal fire;
all these are Pan’s realm.
Come, O blessed and frolicsome one,
O restless companion of the Seasons!
Goat-limbed, reveling,
lover of frenzy, star-haunting,
weaver of playful song,
song of cosmic harmony,
you induce fantasies of dread
into the minds of mortals,
you delight in gushing springs,
surrounded by goatherds and oxherds,
you dance with the nymphs,
you sharp-eyed hunter, lover of Echo.
Present in all growth, begetter of all,
many-named divinity,
light-bringing lord of the cosmos,
fructifying Paian,
cave-loving and wrathful,
veritable Zeus with horns,
the earth’s endless plain
is supported by you,
and the deep-flowing water
of the weariless sea yields to you.
Okeanos who girds the earth
with his eddying stream gives way to you,
and so does the air we breathe,
the air that kindles all life,
and above us the sublime eye
of weightless fire;
at your behest
all these are kept wide apart.
Your providence alters
the natures of all,
on the boundless earth you offer
nourishment to mankind.
Come, frenzy-loving, spirit-possessed,
come to these sacred libations,
come and bring my life
to a good end.
Send your madness, O Pan,
to the ends of the earth.

One Battle After Another, by Paul Thomas Anderson

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

For the last ten years or so I have avoided Hollywood movies, and movies in general, because most of what’s produced out there these days is vehicles for marxism. A couple of days ago I found out that Paul Thomas Anderson, who made Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice, all movies that I either loved or found very interesting, had made a new one, named One Battle After Another, starred by our favorite lover of under-25-year-old women: DiCaprio himself. And the movie is based on a complex book by Thomas Pynchon, about revolutionary movements in the sixties. I was eager to see a movie set in the late sixties and early seventies, an era that has become important to me for reasons. On a personal note, P. T. Anderson is, or used to be, an intimate friend of Joanna Newsom, who is probably the living artist I respect the most (Joanna even had a role in Inherent Vice). So I figured that I finally could drag my aging ass to a movie seat.

It was fucking terrible. Pure political propaganda. P. T. Anderson, or whoever wrote the movie, used Pynchon’s book as an excuse to write a contemporary movie to shit on the US, and by extension on all countries of ethnic European origin, for controlling their borders and not being communist. In the first twenty minutes or so we see DiCaprio (I mistakenly wrote DiCrapio, and perhaps I should have left it like that) acting as the bomber for a communist, terrorist group, whose leader was the most disgusting, over-the-top example of a “black power” revolutionary I remember seeing in fiction. At first, silly me, I thought that DiCaprio’s character was undercover or something. When the black terrorist, after insulting and threatening some border guards, got to Sean Penn’s character and threatened him into getting hard, I realized that this movie was playing it straight. Abhorrent, insulting, morally-bankrupt garbage. That black communist hadn’t even met Sean Penn before; she just assumed that he would find her super hot, as in all white people are attracted to ugly, violent, nasty black women. Are black men even attracted to that?

Other than DiCaprio, the token “ally,” every single person of ethnic European origin in this movie is depicted as evil, a freak, or both. Sean Penn, who is a woketard himself, I assume was doing his best Donald Trump impression, judging by his facial mannerisms. Both DiCaprio and Sean Penn are depicted as being super turned on by the main black communist revolutionary. Sean Penn’s character even pursues her for sex, and gets pegged. Because of course he does. Later on in the movie, in an extremely lazy exchange, another character implies that he’s a closeted homosexual.

After DiCaprio’s character and this black bitch have a child, she berates him for “trapping” her, for trying to get her to act as his mommy, merely because DiCaprio’s character intends for their daughter to have a mother. In the end, this black communist, who was cheating on DiCaprio, abandons her family, murders a guard during an attack, snitches on their revolutionary group to avoid ending up in jail, and leaves the country. By the end of the movie, that fucking bastard is depicted in a sympathetic light, as if she could be redeemed. As in, “Ah, what wild youth we had. I made some mistakes, silly me.”

DiCaprio, being an “ally” ethnic European in a marxist movie, after he went out of his way to have a mixed baby, is depicted as a loser who has wasted the last thirty years destroying his brain with drugs. He spends most of the movie bumbling around, and by the end, he just happens to be in the right place at the right time, after someone else had solved the problem.

Then there’s the whole white supremacy thing. Sean Penn’s character wants to belong to a group named after Christmas (get it?), who are explicitly white supremacists. Those guys turn on Sean Penn when they realize he had a relationship with that black revolutionary bitch, and possibly fathered a child with her.

This movie features a native-American character. As a native-American character in such a marxist movie, he ends up (spoiler) massacring a group of white people named after the American revolution. If you saw that season of Fargo, by the Coen brothers, then you’ve pretty much seen that whole scene. I recall that the Coen brothers also used that season as a vehicle to tell people how terrible the Eastern Europeans were to the jews. Nevermind the fact that 95% of the Bolshevik leaders were jewish and murdered about 30 million ethnic Europeans in what came to be called the Holomodor. A subject you won’t see in any Hollywood movie, nor will you be detained for questioning.

Oh, I forgot. Spoiler, in case you care about this fucking abysmal turd of a movie: DiCaprio’s character is a literal cuck. Sean Penn’s character actually fathered DiCaprio’s daughter. Thus, DiCaprio’s took his rightful place at the bottom of the marxist hierarchy: a discarded “ally” whose efforts and resources are taken up by raising another man’s mixed baby.

Terrible, terrible film. Cinematography was fine, though, if you care about that. What perhaps disturbed me the most about the movie was the way this communist revolution, and all sorts of social revolt focusing on destroying those “evil white men,” were depicted with the moral righteousness of an eighties/nineties film that used nazis as the bad guys. DiCaprio’s “daughter” even ends up as a marxist activist herself, accompanied by uplifting music.

I’d rather eat my own shit than watch this movie again. I guess I have to write P. T. Anderson off my list.

Ongoing manga: Spy x Family, by Tatsuya Endo

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I first found out about this series when barely five chapters had been released, and I’ve been a faithful follower ever since. We’re now about 120 chapters in, with no clue about when it may end, due to its mainly episodic nature. Amidst a fuckton of isekai stories (I’m not shitting on them; I love me some isekai) and stories similar to other existing ones in the Japanese market, Spy x Family is unique in setting, concept, and general tone. The story is set in a fictional continent similar to Europe in the fifties (or at least the Japanese’s idealized image of past Europe), that is experiencing a cold war between two countries named Westalis and Ostania (basically West Germany and East Germany while the Berlin wall was still up).

Our protagonist is a man whom we come to know as Loid Forger (fake name). He’s generally known as Twilight, a legendary spy feared by the rival country of Ostania. He’s been tasked with stopping the warmongering ways of a former prime minister of the enemy country. Given the former prime minister’s reclusive nature, Twilight’s handlers decide that their best chance of worming their way into the prime minister’s life is through his son Damian, who is going to attend an exclusive school. Twilight can’t attend it himself, so he needs to figure out how to get a child, and because the exclusive school looks down on single parents, he’ll need to get himself a wife as well.

Twilight, settled in the enemy country of Ostania, visits an orphanage. That’s how we’re introduced to the most popular character of the story, as well as one of the most popular of modern manga: Anya. The author could have reduced her to an adorable child, which she is, but instead she’s also smug, a bit of a dolt, barely interested in anything but food and her hobbies, and can also read minds.

The author masterfully makes Anya a constant source of joy thanks to her peculiar personality and how she approaches problems. A telepath, she’s aware that her new father is a spy for a foreign nation, which she finds exciting. One of the first things she does is use his spy devices and accidentally get herself kidnapped.

As mentioned, Twilight needs a wife for the mission. They meet Yor, an attractive yet socially and emotionally stunted woman who also requires a husband for the sake of appearances. In her case, she’s the most lethal assassin of Ostania. Through an extremely memorable proposal involving a grenade pin, Twilight ends up married to his number one enemy.

Anya becomes the only person aware of the thorny circumstances of her new family, yet remains unable to fully comprehend them, as her mind is addled by the spy shows she’s addicted to.

What follows are the struggles of Twilight as he tries to turn his new daughter into an elite student, even though she’s an unmotivated idiot. Meanwhile, the overworked guy deals with other spy missions, as both countries continue with their tug-of-war to get the upper hand on the other. We meet many more memorable characters: Yor’s younger brother, who works for the secret police, is in love with his sister, and would love to throw Yor’s new husband in jail on principle. Twilight’s fellow spy Nightfall, his protégé and competent spy on her own right, is madly in love with the guy, and eager to get Twilight’s new wife out of the picture. Damian, the target’s son, a haughty tsundere who can’t accept the fact that he has fallen for the adorable Anya, as getting involved with a commoner would be unfitting of his station. The kids’ headmaster, an earnest man who evaluates the world in terms of elegance. The target’s wife, a subdued mess of nerves, obsessed with the occult, who has a bizarre suspicion about her husband’s real nature. Bond, a precognitive dog that the Forgers adopt. Becky, Anya’s best friend, the heiress of an arms manufacturing company, who despite being a child is planning to replace Yor’s role as Anya’s stepmother.

The author perfectly mixes humor with poignancy. Plenty of characters are marked by the pointless wars that both countries have fought against each other. Twilight himself lost his family (I don’t recall if he lost them in the war or if he was an orphan for as long as he can remember), and also lost his childhood buddies. He works as spy to preserve world peace against forces from both countries that intend to inflame hostilities.

This is mainly an episodic series. We’ve gone through elaborate arcs, such as one in which Twilight and Nightfall have to win a preposterous tennis tournament to get their hands on a piece of intel, one in which the Forgers fight off assassins in a cruise ship, or one in which Anya’s school bus gets hijacked by terrorists. We regularly get chapters focused on secondary characters or on minor aspects of the main characters’ lives, which don’t contribute much to the plot but are always well done. This is one series you always want to return to because you want to see more of the characters and the circumstances they find themselves in.

They’ve adapted this series, to my knowledge, into two seasons of anime and a movie. I only watched most of the first season, but it’s great.

Spy x Family is already a classic of modern manga, which you must read if you’re into the medium.

VR game review: Ghost Town

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, gaming, ReseñasLeave a comment

I’ve been playing a lot of VR recently, so I may as well review the only long-form game that I’ve finished in this couple of weeks. Ghost Town is a puzzle-based adventure game set in Great Britain back in the eighties. You’re a spirit medium (a witch) named Edith, whose shitty younger brother disappeared under shady circumstances, and your goal is to find him. Trailer is below:

There are many more pros than cons as far as I’m concerned. The setting, mainly London in the 80s, is quite unique, and provides a gritty touch that I appreciated. The character animations and models are generally exceptional for the Meta Quest 3, maybe the best I’ve seen so far. I don’t like puzzle games, yet this one made me appreciate the puzzles. I was never entirely stuck, as the progressive hint system helped me eventually realize at least where I should focus on. I loved the tactile feel of exorcising ghosts, although it’s a minor part of the experience. Plenty of great moments come to mind: interacting with ghosts behind glass (great-looking in VR), using eighties ghost-bustery technology to investigate artifacts, a very creative museum of haunted artifacts, sleepwalking through your eerie apartment tower in 80s London, a great sequence in which you wander through a maze-like version of your apartment while malevolent presences whisper from the shadows (very P.T. like), clever use of light in puzzles, etc.

Horror stories are never more terrifying than in VR. Play Phasmophobia if you dare, for example. I try to avoid horror games because of my damaged heart. However, the ghosts in this one are more spooky than scary.

Now, the cons: personally, I wish the game were more like a regular adventure game instead of a puzzle game with a narrative thread woven throughout it. That’s just a personal preference, though; I wish we got the equivalents of the Monkey Island series in VR. Anyway, the least interesting sequence of puzzles for me was the lighthouse, which comes right after the introductory flashback. I actually dropped the game for like a couple of months after I first played it, because I didn’t feel like returning, but I’m glad I picked it back up and continued.

However, my biggest gripe with the story is that you’re supposed to search for your brother, whom you meet in the first scene, when you’re investigating a haunting in an abandoned theatre, but in every damn scene he’s in, the brother comes off as envious, narcissistic, entitled, and overall a complete dickhead. I didn’t want to interact with him. Did the creators believe we would be invested in finding this guy just because he was related to the protagonist? I think it’s a given that they should have made the brother sympathetic, but he annoyed me in every scene he appeared.

All in all, fantastic experience. Perhaps a bit short, but I felt like I got my money’s worth. If you have a Quest 3 and you enjoy these sorts of games, check it out.

Minoru Furuya: my favorite manga author

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

I have barely been able to connect with novels these past ten or so years, and the last living writer I respected, Cormac McCarthy, has been not alive for a while. Most of this half of the world seems to have lost their collective (and collectivist) minds, so when I want to experience a good story, I have to look to the Orient, past the reds. I’ve enjoyed plenty of South Korean stuff, but I’m mostly into Japanese. I’m always on the lookout for the next mind-blowing, perhaps even life-changing manga, but I seem to have run through the vast majority of the quality ones.

A couple of days ago, I thought again about Minoru Furuya, who earned the rare merit of being my favorite manga author. From time to time I look him up hoping that he has finally begun working on a new series, but unfortunately, the guy seems to have retired; his last work was the bizarre Gereksiz, from back in 2015-2016.

I suspect that most manga fans don’t know about Furuya. I’ve yet to talk to anyone who has read any of his works. But I get Furuya’s mind, to the extent that I’m fairly certain he also has OCD: his characters regularly fall into patterns of obsessiveness, and deal with intrusive thoughts and images that they sometimes act upon. The protagonist of his Ciguatera comes to mind, with his spirals of preoccupations in his bedroom, trying to bury his face in a pillow to keep himself from falling further. The protagonist of Himizu, perhaps his overall darkest story, feared being assailed by demons lurking at the corners of his mind, eager to break in. Both very common experiences for OCD sufferers.

Sadly, I’ve read virtually everything of value that Furuya put out. He started with an extremely amateurish series about a high-school ping-pong club (or something like that), a comedy that reminded me of the kind of material I created in middle school. I’ll probably revisit it at some point, but it’s early-nineties carefreeness. He followed up with Boku to Issho (link for my review), another comedy about a bunch of fellows living in poverty who hope to survive while keeping their sanity and dignity intact.

In the 2000s, he went straight from a slapstick comedy to his darkest tale: Himizu. With this one, he introduced the pattern for all the protagonists to come: outcasts with very little going for them, usually burdened by mental issues, who seem mostly pushed around by life. Good stuff sometimes happens to them (regularly, this involves dating someone above their league), but they usually pay for it with chaos and occasional brutality. His are the kinds of stories that go from mundane relationship issues to someone having his ears cut off while tied up in a shack. There’s the sense that life is extremely perilous, and that at any point it will force you to struggle through horror whether or not you’re ready for it, and if you survive it, you may not get any lessons out of it other than “life goes on.”

After Himizu came Ciguatera, generally considered his best. I came across that one plenty of times over the years in lists of best manga ever, but I ignored it because I thought it was a sports manga of sorts, centered on biking. But the bikes ended up being a symbol of a better, brighter future that could carry the protagonists away from their shitty circumstances. Ciguatera is a sort of a Bildunsroman in which the protagonist, a below-average dude with no talents to speak of, intends to figure out how to measure up to the girl he loves, hoping to become a dude worthy of respect. This one had likely the most realistic of Furuya’s endings, to which I have returned repeatedly in my mind.

Then came Wanitokagegisu and Himeanole. Both feature working-class protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, who feel that life is passing them by, who can’t figure out how to improve their circumstances or even become interested by anything, and who are sure they’ll die alone. From that perspective, these last four series are very masculine stories. In both tales, the protagonists get involved in other people’s troubles, which lead them further and further into chaos and brutality. Both also feature the protagonists getting girlfriends way out of their league, which brings joy but also the sense of constantly having to measure up lest they look elsewhere. Both series feature horrific violence. Himeanole wasn’t even licensed in English, and fans have only translated up to chapter eight of about sixty-five. I only know of the full contents of that series, to the extent that an adaptation allows, because they made a movie out of it, which I watched last night.

His last serious story, and my favorite of his, was Saltiness (first review, second review), about a clearly autistic dude who realizes that his beloved sister will remain unmarried because she has to take care of his crazy ass, so he leaves for Tokyo to become independent, even though he’s thoroughly incapable of dealing with life. Saltiness is very hard for me to explain, but it feels like Furuya managed to create a parable with it for dealing with the nonsense of life, and finding one’s place in it despite being ill-suited.

Sadly, Saltiness seemed to have been his main send-off. His final work was the extremely bizarre Gereksiz, which starts with the bizarre premise of a solitary middle-aged man dragging his female coworker to show her the woman that he’s infatuated with, only for them to realize that he’s the only one who can see the woman. The story gets far stranger from there. It’s a great read, although it felt anticlimactic compared with Furuya’s previous works.

Given that these days I consider Furuya to be my favorite manga author, one would suppose that my favorite manga would be one of his, but that’s not the case. My favorite manga, which is among my five favorite fictional experiences in no particular order, is Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun. That one has never stopped haunting me. It feels like Asano was trying to exorcise something out of himself through making that story. Unfortunately, after it ended in 2013 or so, Asano never even came close to achieving those heights again. An idealist, as evidenced by his earlier works, he seems to have expected it to change the world as well as himself, only for Asano to wake up ten years older having resolved fuck all. He wrote a semi-autobiographical series afterwards, titled Downfall, that showed how despondent and bitter he ended up after finishing his masterpiece.

Anyway, I suppose that’s all I wanted to say. Not sure why I even wrote this, but I did, so there.

Guitar practice in the woods (2025-08-11)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, MúsicaLeave a comment

If you enjoy a deranged Spaniard playing guitar in the woods, I’ve got premium content for you.

That spot in the woods is quite isolated and rather unknown even for people who live around, so at the most I get three or four people a session passing by. They’re usually in a hurry. This time only a single person passed by: a woman wearing a pink sports bra, who grinned at me as I played. She was hot, too. The previous day, when I set up shop next to the spot where in a certain novella of mine I installed the memorial stone for the love of my life, I lifted my gaze and briefly connected with a woman who was passing by on a bicycle. She was also grinning at the fact that I was playing the guitar. It’s strange: people, particularly women, are usually wary of me, but put a guitar in my hands, and suddenly they look glad that I’m there. If only they knew.

Also, I recently went to my favorite guitar shop to ask why the thinnest nylon string always broke whenever I tried to tune it on my Alhambra dreadnought, only for the shop guy to tell me that I absolutely shouldn’t use nylon strings on my dreadnought. Apparently I should only use bronze strings, which is what you can hear in the video.

Anyway, that’s an hour of me playing other people’s songs. Enjoy, if you enjoy these sorts of things.

Anime/Manga #1

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Whenever I feel like it, I’ll bring attention to videos or other media about two of my lifelong loves: manga and anime. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is one of the main legends of anime, perhaps the number one. What many don’t know is that the original manga is also a must-read, and in many ways improves and deviates from the movie (more accurately, Otomo himself changed many aspects of the plot to fit the movie).

The following video is a great overview on how special the process of getting Akira made was.

Guitar practice in the woods (2025-07-05)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, MúsicaLeave a comment

Another entry in the series nobody asked for. I went to my usual spot by the Roman foundry on the outskirts of town, so I figured I may as well record my usual guitar-playing routine.

Today left me particularly contented. But as I was walking back home, my mind became a stream of lost pets and other miseries. At least while I play there’s no thinking about anything.

Guitar practice in the woods (2025-06-28)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, MúsicaLeave a comment

Were you waiting for another nearly-hour-long video of me playing the guitar? No? Well, this is awkward. Anyway, I suppose one of these days I should learn new songs, but it’s not like I’m a musician or anything. I do this because it feels good. These days I don’t even go to coffee shops anymore; it’s either holed up at home or playing the guitar in the woods. And I’m fine with that.