Vue nocturne du pont Neuf à Toulouse.

Photographier avec un Olympus E-M5II , en trois prises assemblées en vue panoramique avec GIMP 2.10.30. Par @kaouyana .

Le Pont-Neuf est un pont de Toulouse sur la Garonne, il relie la place du Pont-Neuf à la rue de la République. Construit aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles il est, en dépit de son nom, le plus vieux pont de la ville franchissant la GaronneN 1,N 2. Le Pont-Neuf constituait autrefois une entrée de la cité, symbolisée sur la rive gauche par un arc de triomphe (détruit en 1860) portant une statue équestre du roi Louis XIII. (Article Wikipédia).

Not even thinking about Rustin Cohle has been able to improve my overall humor... We're really in it

24.04.23

You'll understand, won't you? I left my heart in my suitcase, and home is always out on the horizon. I go to the beach alone, and I dance with the tide but scoff at the sea foam. Do you understand? Hopefully. I come home, and the ocean leaks out from my shoe soles.

-one

Isometric action adventure game Noctuary for PC launches November 28

Gematsu Source

Isometric action adventure game Noctuary will launch for PC via Steam on November 28, Chinese developer Gratesca Studio announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

About

Colorful and splendid! An intriguing fairy tale of illuminators!

Alina Nightsong – One of the two protagonists and Fancia’s partner from the Earthcaress Beacon, is passionate…but a bit slow on the draw?

Fancia Dream – One of the two protagonists, the younger sister in the Dream family. Works hard to pass the Arboranger test to fight Darkritters.

Noctuary is a dual-protagonist visual novel. Players can play the role of the duo, Fancia Dream and Alina Nightsong who have dreams of “becoming Arborangers who protect and serve everyone.” Travel through the fairy-tale-like world as the duo, experience their lively daily adventures, and gradually encounter the life story of a mysterious girl who came down from the sky. Meanwhile, don’t forget to fight against the ever-present monsters—“Darkritters!” These dangerous enemies threaten the life of Illuminators constantly. Sharpen your fighting skills, defeat ferocious monsters and ensure peace in your community!

Practice Your Fighting Skills in Marvelous Battles

During your adventure, you will fight against various enemies. You can defeat them with a cascade of powerful combo attacks! The two main characters master different skills and present various fighting styles, which allows you to win a battle in whichever method you choose. Switch between the two girls in battles to cope with enemies’ attacks and finish them off with the powerful On-field Switch skill and the Synergy.

Support Your Favorite Protagonist and the Choices Your Make Will Impact the Ending of the Journey

You will venture into this dreamy world of Aborteria through the lenses of Illuminators. Intriguing character performances, original and melodious music, high-definition game scenes and character images… All this will make your gaming experience unforgettable.

Explore the Sophisticated “Blessing” System

The friendships and blessings you harvest along the journey will strengthen you in battle. Feel free to combine the “Blessing Petals” that are embedded with features of different characters to customize your battle style. In addition, there are many other well-designed cultivation systems that are ready for you to explore!

Watch a new trailer below.

Gameplay Trailer

“"You knew it was hopeless," said Andrew Maness as he stood over the book that lay on the desk, glaring at the pages of old handwriting in black ink. "You told me to always read the right words and to always have them in my mind, but you knew I would read the wrong words. You knew what I was. You knew that such a being existed only to read the wrong words and to want to see those words written across the sky in a black script. Because you yourself were the author of the book. And you brought your son to the place where he would read your words. This town was the wrong place, and you knew it was the wrong place. But you told yourself it was the only place where what you had done . .. might be undone. Because you became afraid of what you and those others had done. For years you were intrigued by the greatest madness, the most atrocious secrets and schemes, and then you became afraid. What did you discover that could make you so afraid, you and the others who were always intrigued by the monstrous things you told of, that you sang of, in the book? You preached to me that all change is grotesque, that the very possibility of change is evil. Yet in the book you declare 'transformation as the only truth' - the only truth of the Tsalal, that one who is without law or reason. 'There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.' You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved - everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.

"Yet these truths of yours that you kept writing in your book cannot be the reason you became afraid, for even while your voice is somber or trembling to speak of these things, your phrases are burdened with fascination and you are always marvelling at the grand mockery of the universal masquerade, the 'hallucination of lies that obscures the vision of all but the elect of the Tsalal.' It is something of which you will not speak or cannot speak that caused you to become afraid. What did you discover that you could not face without renouncing what you and those others had done, without running to this town to hide yourself in the doctrines of a church that you did not truly uphold? Did this knowledge, this discovery remain within you, at once alive and annihilated to your memory? Was it this that allowed you to prophesy that the people of Moxton would return to their town, yet prevented you from telling what phenomenon could be more terrible than the nightmare they had fled, those grotesque changes which had overtaken the streets and houses of this place?”

“"As a young man," the Reverend Maness explained to his son, who was now a young man himself, "I thought myselt an adept in the magic of the old gods, a communicant of entities both demonic and divine. I did not comprehend for years that I was merely a curator in the museum where the old gods were on display, their replicas and corpses set up in the countless galleries of the invisible . . . and now the extinct. I knew that in past millennia these beings had always replaced one another as each of them passed away along with the worlds that worshipped them. This mirror-like succession of supreme monarchs may still seem eternal to those who have not sensed the great shadow which has always been positioned behind every deity or pantheon. Yet I was able to sense this shadow and see that it had eclipsed the old gods without in any way being one of their kind. For it was even older than they, the dark background against which they had forever carried on their escapades as best they could. But its emergence into the foreground of things was something new, an advent occurring not much more than a century ago. Perhaps this great blackness, this shadow, has always prevailed on worlds other than our own, places that have never known the gods of order, the gods of design. Even this world had long prepared for it, creating certain places where the illusion of a reality was worn quite thin and where the gods of order and design could barely breathe. Such places as this town of Moxton became fertile ground for this blackness no one had ever seen.

"Yes, it was not much more than a century ago that the people of this world betrayed their awareness of a new god that was not a god. Such an awareness may never be complete, never reach a true agony of illumination, except among an elect. I myself was slow in coming to it. The authenticity of my enlightenment may seem questionable and arbitrary, considering its source. Nonetheless, there is a tradition of revelation, an ancient protocol, by which knowledge of the unseen is delivered to us through inspired texts. And it is by means of these scriptures dictated from beyond that we of this world may discover what we have not and cannot experience in a direct confrontation. So it was with the Tsalal. But the book that I have written, and which I have named Isalal, is not the revealed codex of which I am speaking. It is only a reflection, or rather a distillation, of those other writings in which I first detected the existence, the emergence, of the Tsalal itself.

"Of course, there have always been writings of a certain kind, a primeval lore which provided allusions to the darkness of creation and to monstrosities of every type, human and inhuman, as if there were a difference. Something profoundly dark and grotesque has always had a life in every language of this world, appearing at intervals and throwing its shadow for a moment upon stories that try to make sense of things, often confounding the most happy tale. And this shadow is never banished in any of these stories, however we may pretend otherwise. The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all the legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night, in all the mythologies of mad gods and lucid demons, there remains a kind of mocking nonsense to the end, a thick and resonant voice which calls out from the heart of these stories and declares: 'Still I am here.' And the idiot laughter of that voice - how it sounds through the ages!

This laughter often reaches our ears through certain stories wherein this grotesque spirit itself has had a hand. However we have tried to ignore the laughter of this voice, however we have tried to overwhelm its words and protect ourselves by always keeping other words in our minds, it still sounds throughout the world.

"But it was not much more than a century ago that this laughter began to rise to a pitch. You have heard it yourself, Andrew, as you furtively made incursions into my library during your younger days, revelling in a Gothic feast of the grotesque. These books do not hold an arcane knowledge intended for the select few but were written for a world which had begun to slight the gods of order and design, to question their very existence and to exalt in the disorders of the grotesque. Both of us have now studied the books in which the Tsalal was being gradually revealed as the very nucleus of our universe, even if their authors remained innocent of the revelations they were perpetrating. It was from one of the most enlightened of this sect of Gothic storytellers that I took the name of that one. You recall, Andrew, the adventures of an Arthur Pym in a fantastic land where everything, people and landscape alike, is of a perfect blackness - the Antarctic country of Tsalal. This was among the finest evocations I had discovered of that blackness no one had ever seen, a literary unveiling of being without soul or substance, without meaning or necessity - not a universe of design and order but one whose sole principle was that of senseless transmutation. A universe of the grotesque. And from that moment it became my ambition to invoke what I now called the Tsalal, and ultimately to effect a worldly incarnation of the thing itself.”

2023.11.28 日本語主題歌のボーカル担当しました！ (以下敬称略)

———— Gratesca Studio制作「夢灯華 Noctuary」

Track86「Phosphene -Japanese Full ver.-」

Track87「Phosphene -Japanese Gamesize ver.-」

夢灯華 Noctuary > ダウンロードコンテンツ > Noctuary Original Soundtrack https://store.steampowered.com/app/2696340/Noctuary_Original_Soundtrack/

Bonobo must have felt weird during the noughts, he was an outsider. I mean, his albums were close to what the times were, yet they also differed immensely. Moreover, he even tried to perform his pieces on his tours. I can hear you're already rolling your eyes over the statement, yet Live Sessions should prove you wrong about the electronic musicians of his ilk. You see, he actually gathered a band to perform his songs, so he did something few of his peers even attempted, i.e. he checked how his songs function outside the confines of electronica. He continues to do that, showing us a musician who's willing to challenge the stereotypes of his music. That might be one of his biggest successes, i.e. he showed this type of compositions can be more than just a certain set.

I forget who I bought these wax melts from, but they're taking me places, and I'm so greatful.

Lavender 🪻 & blood orange 🍊.

💜🧡

Rare Word Of The Day (RWOTD)

Noctuary

(n.) the record of a single night's events, thoughts, or dreams

[X] " What even are daddy issues? Just traumatize your father back." Masoko to Kaede >:3C

unhinged comedic relief

"Traumatizing him is exactly what got me into this mess, Macchan, it's not going to work. Haven't I told you enough times? Kurai'll just beat the shit out of me and have me detained at the estate on principle and call it a day - don't tell Adrian about that, if you value our friendship. I don't need his already wracked nerves even more wracked than they already are. He'd just get worried and be even weirder around me. I want him to like me, not worry about me to the point we take fifteen steps back - like how things used to be. Also, your advice sucks and I'm not getting jumped by not only my dad, but Aoi and the rest too. I can be damn near special-grade all day long - it doesn't matter, if there's twenty first and seconds trying to beat me within an inch of my life, so... no thanks."

"By the way, does Adrian like chocolate? I have some chocolate oranges on the way, and I figure..."

Honestly upsetting how the only alternative to life is death. I need to exist in some other way, I NEED A THIRD OPTION

"My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?"

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Noctuary releases today on Steam.

[ 𝐑𝐄𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐄 ] ― sender and receiver see each other again after a period of being apart

For Nanami and Haibara if you're still doing these 😭

from x

Since enrolling in Jujutsu Tech, Haibara has been an ever-present fixture in Kento’s life. A bright, almost blinding concoction of enormous eyes, a wide grin, and an absurd bowl cut, always in close proximity. Save for the occasions they parted ways to retreat to adjoining bedrooms after gruelling training sessions, they were inseparable. “Joined at the hip,” Ieiri once quipped, her amusement veiled behind a deadpan stare. Even after the day’s trials, they often spent evenings together, sharing movie nights with a laptop balanced on their laps until exhaustion claimed one of them.

However, when Haibara ventures on a mission with another sorcerer, Kento finds himself adrift, unsure of how to fill the void left in his wake. He attempts to stifle the silence and occupy his mind with books, training, and even awkward attempts at socializing with his seniors, often resulting in discord. Without Haibara to temper his entire personality, he clashes with them more often than not.

Which is why he resigns himself to seeking guidance from Yaga sensei and hovering around his own underclassmen, who tolerate him and his dour moods with much more grace. The mission, sensei explains, while Kento checks his phone for the umpteenth time, is in a remote area. Which is why he has received no phone calls or messages.

“Sorry, Nanami,” he says, settling a large hand on Kento’s head. “He’ll be back soon.”

Soon, as it happens, is the following day. There are no extravagant celebrations or fanfare heralding Haibara's arrival, just a palpable concentration of curse energy travelling down the corridor towards him. Or their rooms, rather. Feeling his pulse quicken in recognition, Kento abandons his desk, his pen sliding from his grip, forgotten on stacks of homework. Before the shifting ball of energy can pass by, Kento, in a fit of something, throws his door open, startling both himself and Haibara on the other side. Without a word, he steps forward, enveloping his best friend in a tight embrace, silently conveying a heartfelt welcome back.

“You sure took your time,” he grumbles, his voice laced with frustration at the delay, though he knows Haibara isn’t to blame. After releasing him, Kento scrutinizes him for any signs of injury, concern evident in the furrow of his brow. “Are you hurt? Do you need to see Ieiri-senpai?” Followed by, “Are you hungry? I’ll make you something to eat while you have a shower. You smell burnt.”

Megumi's hand stops short from touching the jellyfish, second thoughts running in his mind before glancing at Junpei.

"Can I pet them, or would I get poisoned...?" Kuku bites his sleeve and pulls him away some, as if worried about the possibility, Megumi gives her some headpats to calm the dog down.

@elysian-noctuary // X