Turtle Post

K-Pop Demon Hunters

Saul Torres

So I finally got around to watching K-Pop Demon Hunters. Unfortunately for me this wasn't a movie that I could afford to just put off for a while. As someone who actively listens to a lot of pop music, and especially so K-Pop and J-Pop, as their songs have charted in popularity over the weekend, I wasn't able listen to those playlists on Spotify, unless I wanted to dodge the songs - since I wasn't willing to listen to them without watching the film.

So this was essentially inevitable.

Upon putting the movie on, I was immediately greeted by an interesting surprise. It was animated by Sony Pictures Animation Imageworks, which is the same studio that did the Spider-Verse movies and The Mitchells vs the Machines. This was a delightful surprise right off the bat. As the movie went on it was clear the studio has really evolved over the years.

It's not the same style as the Spider-verse movies, but I could clearly see a lot of the same mannerisms and facial expressions from TMvTM. I think my favorite little detail is the hat on the Magpie.

The songs throughout were as to be expected, phenomenal. I ended up reading through the Wikipedia page, since I was curious about if they got singers to be the voices of the characters, but apparently not, they instead did the thing where you have different VAs for singing and for Acting. This is a nice compromise, and one that was probably necessary, when you have a movie like this where every song almost essentially needs to be a hit, the number of top song-writers you need to hire to churn out all of them must be a nightmare to manage. They DO manage it though, the songs are great and very catchy, I'm excited to look into the Your Idol song the boyband preformed (probably tomorrow while at work).

The story was pretty solid. For a movie that is essentially one long music video, it's hard to interweave a really good story between all the songs, even if you can manage a level of exposition within the songs themselves. But I think my biggest gripe with the story is the resolution of the story.

In my mind it felt like they took the path of maintaining the status quo. They let the barrier fall and had a chance to work towards a new method of resolving the situation more permanently. But instead we just got them reforming the barrier essentially how it was while paying lip-service to accepting oneself. Which is fine, but it's such a boring and common wrap-up.

They had the perfect elements to flip the tables and build redemption into the story for not just the main antagonist boy, but also for all the demons trapped on the other side. They could have stolen back the demons into the human world, absolving them of their sins (if that's what was the cause of their transformations) and starving the big-bad of the film of the power to do anything. Rebuilding a better path of acceptance of even those who make mistakes or are scared to show themselves for fear of what others may think of them.

All in all it was a great movie. I wonder if we'll get any more. I still have my Jentry Chau vinyl and am still regularly listening to those songs so I suspect these may similarly stick around.

Another break-out song that hit me today was Hello by Furui Riho, which debuted yesterday in the first episode of City The Animation by Kyoani.

That's all, we'll see if I do more reviews...

Perfect is the Enemy of Progress

Saul Torres

I've been wanting to get Turtle Post back up and running for a while now. Originally it was merely a website dedicated to the little library I put in front of my house. But over the years I decided to revamp it as my primary online presence. I like the name, and I feel like I have a lot to add to it.

I could have just revived the static site I made for it originally. But when thinking about what I wanted for it's future - to be a place where I can share my thoughts and projects - I realized that while it offers the maximum amount of control on a per page basis. The publish and management time/cycle required isn't tennable in the long term.

After looking around for a while I eventually settled on a markdown based website built using Hugo. This works fairly well with Obsidian as my primary note taking repository and allows for a ton of flexibility in the future. But this also presented an issue.

As soon as I installed Hugo I knew I wanted to make it my own. To write everything from the templates to the css styling. And immediately started work learning the system... And down the rabbithole I went.

I could have simply used a "Good Enough" template. But despite finding several that looked nice. I had an aversion to their complicated setup. And yet here I was reinventing the wheel, steadily learning an entire new api and deeply powerful but complicated templating system. And I was deadlocked and buried under the mountain of work I put forward for myself. I even had a template system I was essentially copying part by part. Learning as I went.

This is a problem and lesson I tend to learn over and over again. I strive for perfection in the things I do. To make my projects worth the time and effort I put into them. But it's also a trap. I get bogged down, stressed out and end up quitting.

So I've decided to just get on with it and use that template I like. I know who I am. I won't be satisfied with it as it is. But I can afford to upgrade it over time to suit my needs. Learning at a slower pace while still getting active use out of the site. It WILL change, this site WILL evolve over time. It's as inevitable as me taking on new projects.

But today the website lives. And I was able to make my first post. A cautionary tale on perfection vs

Restoring the Showcard Press

Saul Torres

This project was originally completed 2023-05-26

The Showcard Proof Presses are small presses used largely in stores for promotional posters and small-run prints. One day when I was looking through our storage on the 3rd floor of the museum I happened across a box with this press under it's associated letter tray. The box itself practically disintegrated as I pulled this one out of it, but the press was in fantastic condition.

I brought the press home and immediately set to disassembling it. With a couple of tools, a scotch pad and some time I was able to get all the dirt and grime off of it and re-assemble it.

As far as restorations go, this is just about the best-case scenario. A press that was well kept but just covered in dried ink that can be removed to expose the machine below, without much in the way of Rust. Since I finished cleaning up this press, we've used it at the museum a lot for doing example prints for school children who come to visit. It's a pleasant and simple machine to use and it gave me the confidence to work on much larger projects like the Challenge Proof Press.

Yama Typeface

Saul Torres

My original Post: 2024-11-07

A while back I was listening to some music and I noticed the Album Art for Yama's "The Meaning of Life" and I thought the typeface was extremely curious, but was unable to find it anywhere online with a cursory search. Throughout the day I found myself doodling the letter forms as I did my work. By the end of the day I felt I had a pretty good set of all the characters, so I decided to figure out more of the proportions and try to get as close as I could with a full alphabet. This ended up being the result.

Thoughts from 9 months on...

I'm still incredibly proud of this small project. From conception to actualization it was actually on the shorter side of my projects - a couple days really - and it resulted in some really nice letterforms. Something I explored for a bit at the time but quickly gave up on was the idea to create a proper typeface out of it. That can be installed on someone's computer. I may still do that one day, and maybe I'll update this post for that, but for now I'm just glad to have a place to share these files for whomever may stumble upon this post and use it for whatever they wish.

I'm not sure what the license is on the original font, but all of my work is CC-BY-SA-NC 4.0.

Yama Typeface Download