Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
As children we take in immense amounts of information without question; we experience the world without expecting it to explain itself, nor with the aim to categorise it into an established worldview. As an adult, when I have a notable experience I will record it concretely in some manner: take a photo of a holiday, write down the name of the film I just watched, even just take the time to properly think about it and etch it more permanently in memory. I find I hardly ever "lose track" of memories. I can almost always place them within their correct (or perceived correct) context: when, where, what, who and why. But deep-memories from my childhood are far more abstract. Many of them sit void of context: I couldn't tell you if they happened when I was three or eight years, and almost none of them have any situational analysis packaged with them. When on occasion they do bubble up into the cartesian theatre, I have to consider and analyse them like its the first time seeing them, in turn revealing my state of mind as a child to have been markedly Saturnalian. But to remember, analyse and then restow these memories away is to permanently colour them. Once processed from their juvenile form they must lose the purity and innocence that made them so powerful. For a memory so lacking in context to remain within the network of my mind for so long must mean it had some strong but abstract meaning which must surely be of some importance or interest. It is very much like analysing a dream. Upon waking, a dream is held in a similar decontextualised form. I often lie in bed after waking up replaying them in my head, usually in reverse, going further and further back into the story trying to remember and to record. Sometimes dreams of intense emotion reveal themselves to be utterly without sense, characters shifting from one person to another illogically, whereas in the dreamworld such surrealism is trifling. To record a dream is also to process it: dull the corners and smooth out the imperfections, mixing the hallucinations of the child-mind with the logic of the adult-mind to create a coherent narrative. But what makes real childhood memories more powerful than dreams is their longevity: very rarely will a dream be recallable even minutes after waking up, but the same memory from when you were four years old can recur many dozens of times over decades of your life without rhyme nor reason.
One such memory from my life describes this point well. While not from "deep" childhood, it encapsulates the "contextual drift" that occurs when processing these fuzzy memories. I started watching anime sometime in 2012, at first watching on random websites (googling "watch X anime online free" did the trick) or via uploads on Youtube. And I would get recommendations primarily through either fanart on Newgrounds, or from AMVs/clip compilations online. One such clip (I think it was part of an AMV compilation) stuck in my mind so vividly I've been trying to track it down ever since. It went thusly. A teenage boy is wandering through a forest. He enters a clearing in the trees bathed in green-blue light. In the clearing is a circular shallow pond with glowing orbs of light emanating from the surface. In the middle of the pond ia an impressive old oak. The boy approaches the tree in wonder, and as he steps into the pond he sees the figure of a sleeping girl etched into the tree's bark. The tree starts to glow and the figure begins to break out from the tree's trunk, manifesting into a flesh & blood girl. She steps down from the tree and into the pond, leaves falling from her hair. She touches the boy on the hand and the scene concludes. Over the years I was occasionally reminded of this scene, vaguely wondering where it could have been from. But several years back around 2020 I made a concerted effort to remember more details and search for it. I drew sketches of the scene, I described it to people on anime forums, I trawled through potentially related threads on 4chan. But the more I searched the less I could really remember about my original memory, and the more I doubted if it was real at all. I recognised parts of the scene from other media I liked as a child. The pond and the glowing orbs are very similar to the fairy springs of the Zelda series, and there are versions of a tree turning into a girl in so many tales ranging from the Dryads of Classical mythology (and the Chronicles of Narnia) to the opening episode of Kannagi (which was my leading theory at this point, but it just doesn't fit at all). At some point I decided it must have just been a composite hallucination of all these things and more, and that the original animation didn't exist, so I gave up the search. That was until I just came across the anime totally coincidentally. It had been sitting there unwatched on my plan-to-watch list for several years, but so few people have watched it and the scene in question is so incidental it never came up in my searches. "Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai", "This Ugly yet Beautiful World" is a TV anime from 2004 about an alien girl who comes to Earth. She comes down in a ball of green-blue light and lands in the boughs of a beech tree in a pond in a clearing in a wood (I can't believe I got the wrong tree species). And while I am 95% certain this must be the clip, as it looks so close to what I remember, there are several aspects which differ: the girl manifests bathed in light in the crook of the trees branches, but she doesn't come out from the tree's wood directly. There are no glowing orbs, but instead just many falling leaves reflecting the eery light. The scene also has many aspects I hadn't recalled at all. The girl is starkers, which I guess I just hadn't thought about in the prepubescence state I was in when I first saw it. Additionally there's a giant snake monster which interrupts the scene which you would think I would remember, although the clip I had originally watched may have cut this out? Overall while I had indeed found the grail, it wasn't exactly what I had been seeking. The perfect form of that memory exists only within my mind: constructed around this real scene with the additions of all the other things going through my mind for the last decade.
^The scene in question. If you want to watch it I have uploaded it here.
But while this is a concrete example of memory-creep, as one goes further into their youth memories become much more conceptual and interlaced with fantasy; I have several mysterious memories that still haunt me from childhood. By their nature the ones I can recall now are those which come back to me most often, and have therefore been processed to death by the varying stages of my mind's systems. The first is the mystery of the "Laughing Owl & the Terrible Woodlouse". Sounding like some off-kilter children's picturebook, these two terrifying figures have been constant characters within my dreams since I was maybe four years old. Generally their appearances are as follows. I feel a presence outside the window while tucked up in bed, so I get up and crack the curtain to look outside. Opposite the house sits a tall oak tree, black in the night. Nothing seems to be happening out the window, until I hear a quiet inhuman cackling sound from the tree. Straining my eyes into the dark I make out a pair of glowing golden eyes in the tree, staring straight at me. As soon as I spot the owl its laughter grows louder and louder, and sometimes I can even make out the shape of the owl's strange round hulking body silhouetted against the nightsky affixed with its piercing yellow eyes. I close the curtains quickly and jump back into bed, pulling up the covers and trying to go back to sleep, the laughing of the owl still ringing in my ears. That's when the shuffling at my door begins. Quietly, almost softly the door begins to open, and the sound of many legs scuttle across the floor. I've never seen the giant woodlouse, and he's never done me any harm, but he scuttles around my room, climbs onto my bed, looms over me for hours on end, all while the cackling of the owl outside grows louder and softer and louder again outside...
I used to draw these characters in my sketchbook as a young child, much to slight worriment of my parents, but I remember being frustrated I could never portray the true fear of them nor get their real forms across on the page. Where they came from its really hard to tell. I used to love digging around in the soil so I imagine woodlice were on my mind a lot. And as for the owl, I think it must have come from the school crest of my first primary school, which was a particularly off depiction of an owl. But the source of them really isn't important, as is the case with many of these sorts of internal memories. Whatever their original forms, I have mythologised them into representations of very complex ideas, in this case a very personal understanding of "darkness", "fear", "mockery", etc etc. And that's why, at the end of the day, memories are there to be remembered, and even if by doing so you colour them with falsities those falsities are still "true" internally. The interpretations of your dreams are usually more important than the dreams themselves.
