The Checkout Counter #30
April 2025

Memoir of a Snail

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

happy may 🙋 i've been streamlining a lot of the HTML + CSS on my site and it's so much easier to work with—before i was just haphazardly throwing code together as i needed it. everything looks (and is) a bit more slick. the library and cinema pages have also been updated.

thanks, as always, for reading!

Film

  • Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant), 2023cute! a bit more saccharine than i like, but that's fine. feels trite to say, but it should've been gay imo!

    love how often the protagonist sucks on blood bags like juice pouches—classic stuff.
    Comedy, romance, horror. A sensitive young vampire must learn to hunt on her own after her family cuts her off from their blood supply.
  • Memoir of a Snail, 2024i liked this a lot! definitely cried a bit at the end (which is rare). laughed a bunch, too. the bond between the twins is so special…sniffs
    Animation, tragicomedy. A twin sister regales a snail with her misfortune-ridden life story.

Books

  • The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Patricia Highsmiththis seems to be the least regarded ripley novel, and i can see why; there's no real sense of danger or looming comeuppance. especially compared to the previous three ripleys—rife with murder and deception—this is basically a fun little detour in berlin. it follows tom's schedule to a T: we're privy to when he wakes up, what he lunches on, how he books flights and hotels. as someone who likes these books because of the titular character and how they dig into his interiority, i was well entertained. can't believe tom of the talented mr. repression fame is going to gay discotheques and dressing in drag now. good for him.

    the queer subtext of the first few books is basically just text now, which took me by surprise. tom muses about how convenient it is that his wife doesn't mind their mostly sexless relationship, and she spends a good portion of her time with a close female friend. tom's queerness is basically an open secret, in the same way his criminality is: people have their suspicions and may pry into him about it, but no one confronts him directly (and the few who do are quickly dispatched of). there's also a strong throughline here of disguises and how performing as another person is freeing, which slots nicely into the reading that this series' central queer metaphor is not the closet, but of passing: tom passes as straight (which he's embarrassed by when he realizes this at a gar bar), tom passes as old money, tom passes (barely) as an upstanding and honest citizen.
    Crime, thriller. In the fourth Ripliad novel, Tom Ripley and a young American runaway are drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin.
  • Ripley Under Water, Patricia Highsmith"Never kick a man when he's down, Tom thought, and gave Pritchard another kick, hard, in the midriff."

    i yelled when i finished the book because the ending was so abrupt lmao. my e-reader told me there was 5% of the book left!

    this was the first truly suspenseful ripley book for me, since i knew our titular character would get away with everything in the previous four, but was unsure about the final installment. it's funny how much of this book is about tom hating his new neighbors (even he was weirded tf out) and lamenting over how much suffering they're causing him. there's a paragraph where he feels so put upon that he indirectly compares himself to jesus christ. he's so funny.

    with that, i've reached the end of the ripliad. now i'll have to get my hands on the screen adaptations that i haven't seen before. goodbye, ripley, for now...
    Crime, thriller. In the fifth and final Ripliad novel, Tom Ripley's past rises back to the surface.

Music

Articles & essays

Games

  • CSS Clicker, lyra.horse
    Make a website. A clicker game made entirely in HTML/CSS.
  • Spring Gothic, Prof. Lily
    Visual novel. Two women in an online long-distance relationship meet up in London for the first time.
  • portrait on imagined horizon, Domino Club
    Interactive fiction. A mystery surrounding a poem titled, Portrait On Imagined Horizon.
  • DREAM NO MORE, KA Tan
    Interactive fiction. A monologue from a dream architect in the distant future.

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