monster anatomy

Aili and I found this while putzing around Drawn!

Yōkai Daizukai, an illustrated guide to yōkai authored by manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, features a collection of cutaway diagrams showing the anatomy of 85 traditional monsters from Japanese folklore (which also appear in Mizuki’s GeGeGe no Kitarō anime/manga).

The Makura-gaeshi (”pillow-mover”) is a soul-stealing prankster known for moving pillows around while people sleep. The creature is invisible to adults and can only be seen by children. Anatomical features include an organ for storing souls stolen from children, another for converting the souls to energy and supplying it to the rest of the body, and a pouch containing magical sand that puts people to sleep when it gets in the eyes. In addition, the monster has two brains — one for devising pranks, and one for creating rainbow-colored light that it emits through its eyes.

More to be found at Pink Tentacle.

bullet bill destroys earth

YES.  Animated gifs rule.

zombie driver

Aili and I are legitimately pumped about Zombieland, although we're not sure when we're going to get a chance to see it.  Hopefully, soon.  The pure absurd mayhem of it is certainly appealing.

Whether by coincidence or not, I've also been encountering a fair number of indie zombie games lately, both recently released and on the horizon.  Here's one I'll be keeping my eye on, again, just for the absurd mayhem of it.

Meet Zombie Driver.

Very old-school GTA meets zombie apocalypse.  Seems like a classic combination already.  If this is priced right (~$10), it could be an instant underground hit.

clockwords

Steampunk Scrabble.  That's the best description I can give you of the internet game, Clockwords.  You're an inventor who's discovered a machine that runs on the power of language.  Your evil nemesis sends mechanical spiders to take away your best secrets.  Nonsense, really, and largely irrelevant.  The game is all about generating words from a small set of letters as quickly as possible.  There's a typing aspect too, since if you can't type them quickly, you're going to lose.

Each level starts simply, with a single letter.  If you use all the letters available to you to spell a word, a new letter will enter into your "chamber."  So now there are 2 letters for you - and then 3 - and so on.  You don't have to form words using all the letters in your chamber, but it's the best strategy to pass a level.  Once you get to 6 and 7 letters, things obviously become difficult - esp. when you see those damn spiders approaching your machine and you realize that every second you spend thinking about the answer is bringing you closer to defeat.

 

So, what's a word with E, G, D, F, and Y in it?  Quick!

If that sounds fun to you, try it out.  The basic version is free, although I believe the developers have plans to charge small amounts of money if you want to buy certain letters.  I doubt it'll ever come to that for me - but then again, I'm absolutely stuck at level 11 of the prologue and wonder if I'm capable of getting past it without some help.  Surprisingly, Clockwords has a certain amount of strategic depth to it.  After each level, you can visit your "boiler" to see all the letters that you've collected.  These are the letters that will appear in your chamber during the course of a level.  As in Scrabble, letters that are harder to use in words (X, Z) do more damage against the spiders.  So you want to collect those letters but not too many of them.  You can combine letters that you've collected in the "transmute chamber" to form new letters.  For example, if you put an "I" and "S" together, you might get a "G". 

 If you try it, let me know how far you get.  Level 11 is a bitch.