iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

My new comic And She Slept is available in digital and print! Set in far north Aotearoa, Dog Christina becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a missing hotel manager and a lake mummy. Memories of her father start creeping back. Has she been here before? scratchandjesus.com/books/and-she-slept/

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Galarian Borowczyk @sohamandcheese.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (Terrence Davies, 1988)

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amanda (sky ephemera) @skyephemera.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

my favorite 2025 music releases

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Critical Distance | Where’s all the good writing about games? @critdistance.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Thank you all for your patience! Without further ado, it's This Year In Videogame Blogging 2025, complete with a bonus This Week In Videogame Blogging, December 28, 2025! critical-distance.com/2026/01/01/t...

critical-distance.com

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

favourite 2025 music releases (work in progress 'til i die??)

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

None of the effort's mine, but I wrote an essay for it called 'Maggots in the Mix: the imPurity of the album, of the voice, of time' maxwcoombes.neocities.org/writing-art/...

maxwcoombes.neocities.org

Maggots in the Mix: Slipknot's Debut Remixed

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Now that the Slipknot 25th Anniversary edition is out, I'd like to draw attention to the Slipknot Maggot Mix (2025) — a bootleg that uses demos, outtakes, live experiments, and studio notes to vitally *reimagine* the original instead of simply recontextualising it www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rSp...

youtube.com

Slipknot - Slipknot (2025 Maggot Remix) Full Album

YouTube video by stubblejumper

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Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

The Journal of Games Criticism has published a new issue!! Come and read 6 great new open-access game studies articles! gamescriticism.org/issue-6-1/ #gamestudies

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 1 (JANUARY 2026)
The Wounds That Never Healed: Videoludic Trauma in Cry of Fear

by Samuel Poirier-Poulin

This article offers a conceptualization of trauma in horror video games, arguing that games can cut across the reality/fiction divide, deeply affect the emotional organization of the player, and leave them with wounds that take time to heal. More specifically, it develops the idea that Cry of Fear (Team Psykskallar, 2013) can induce a form of trauma in the player by putting them in horrifying and intense situations.

Character Affectivity in Newton and the Apple Tree

by Henri M. Nerg

This paper studies character affectivity and temporality in the Japanese visual novel Newton and the Apple Tree (Laplacian, 2017). The paper analyzes different affects and emotions that game characters evoke in players. Importantly, affect is understood here as a neuropsychological concept.

Black Sun in the Land of Shadow: DLCs and Textual Depletion in Shadow of the Erdtree (2024)

by Max Coombes

This article explores the relationship between downloadable content (DLC) and base games in producing ‘lack’ in the player and text, using Shadow of the Erdtree (2024) as its focus.

Investigating Development Crunch in Games and its Impact on Creative Expression

by Shaif Hemraj

This article explores the often negative and detrimental relationship between “crunch” and creative expression and synthesizes academic and industry conversations into a serious game prototype, Game Maker Mayhem

A Contemporary Take on Victorian Lunacy: Representations of the Asylum in the Neo-Victorian Video Game Alice: Madness Returns

by Jéssica Iolanda Costa Bispo

Considering the historical reality of Victorian asylums, this article explores Alice: Madness Returns, as it encourages a critical look at these institutions through the lens of neo-Victorianism, demonstrating a potentiality for reinterpreting the Victorian historical narrative.

Goblins for Slaughter: The Perpetuation of Racism and Classism in Baldur’s Gate 3

by Benjamin J.M. Horn

This article explores how Baldur’s Gate 3 has perpetuated Victorian-era racism and classism. To demonstrate this, the article discusses current literature on racism and monstrosity, delves into the history of the goblin, and conducts a close reading of Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act.

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𝙑𝙀𝙀𝙏𝙍𝙄 : Blast Processed 🥑 @parametricavocado.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Alright! Let's actually talk about this waterfall thing. It is an amazing showcase of many things that I adore from late 90s/early 2000s graphics. I am replicating this in Blender through mere observation, so some things might not be fully accurate to the mind-boggling effects of the PS1.

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

this closeup, casually deforming space-time, in the swimmer (1968)

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amanda (sky ephemera) @skyephemera.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

that geese album from this year is no good at all. like if matt bellamy and x ambassadors got together to make a krautrock album

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Omg I've been trying to explain it and that's exactly it 😱

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

watching the living dead at manchester morgue (1974), saw a sign reading "Climbers Hikers Served in Passage →," and thought about m john harrison's climbers (1989) letterboxd.com/sisterlisa66...

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Dr Florence Smith Nicholls @florencesn.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

I'm immediately wondering what implications this will have for preserving play and the contemporary archaeology of video games And the genAI models that will be potentially trained on these upscaled videos

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Good stuff! Share more writing!

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Hands in Susan Te Kahurangi King Untitled 1974-79; 1975-79. Her work both makes you want to draw, and wonder why anybody ever tried to draw since

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Which in turn brings me back to Merleau-Ponty, for whom impersonal alienation from one's own body is, paradoxically, the precondition for embodiment

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Both bring me to Nicoll's 'Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa' (2022), and its corrective to simplified notions of the gaze journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

It reminded me of a bit in Resident Evil 1, where we walk into a room and realise too late we've been watching the 'wrong' image of ourselves

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Max Coombes @maxcoombes.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Insane sequence in The Spiral Staircase (1946) - we see Helen ascend the staircase, we realise it's a reflection, Helen sees her mirror image, in her reflection Helen remembers she cannot speak