#READ 17776 RIGHT FUCKING NOW

[wilhelmina-murray-harker]

PLS TALK TO ME MORE AB 17776 PLAY QUEEN

SLAY OKAY SO

I don’t have it very fleshed out yet but it’s quite literally just 17776 as a play. Like I will be taking all the dialogue from the original with only minor changes (like changing the references to the way they’re typing to the way they’re speaking and other stuff that wouldn’t quite translate) but I have yet to get there

Each of the chapters is a scene, with the accompanying video being played during the scene change. All visuals and graphics are projected at the pertinent moment(s) during their scene, so they still provide that extra help with picturing what’s happening

It would probably be a fairly small cast, with obviously Nine, Ten, and JUICE being the leads, and then probably ten or so other actors making up the humans (and hubble that one time) they interact with and playing multiple roles. Most football scrimmages would also physically happen on stage, and the immense numbers of players would be hinted at for the most part. I will now include some of my bullet points of key moments:

When Nine wakes up, they’re on the USR platform while Ten (and later JUICE) are on the USL

Once Nine fully wakes up, they join them on USL

OH MY FUCKING GOD IT STARTS WITH SOMEONE READING A NEWS REPORT (probably over radio or tv) AND THEN IT GLITCHES OUT

Nancy running in the audience before she goes into the tornado????? If I don’t want her coming in house left I could have her hide in the sound booth until then and pop out house right

I’ve done some basic designing for it (set, costumes, etc) that maybe will eventually also include drawings but I’m not sure. I think it would be SO fun to suggest this as a show to direct at my school for next (next) season but that would also involve asking Jon Bois if it’s okay that I do this at all lol

[neomedievalist]

WOWEE some of those questions are extremely loaded but ummmm 4, 17, 133, 141 for the ask game ^_^ (sorry tahts a lot u dont have 2 answer all of them) - rio

4. Are you easy to get along with?

Um im insane. i will sit there and listen to you talk and for most people thats all they need so. Yes? however all i know about is like niche jrpgs so when my coworker is like Omg haveu seen this new show on netflix im like. Um. <--Literallyy doesnt watch tv at all

17 Do you think there is life on other planets?

i feel like theres no one whos going to realistically answer no to this question. objectively yes theres going to be some bacteria living 10,000 light years away somewhere, but i think the probability of 'intelligent life' not only existing, but being discoverable and able to contact us, is ridiculously low to the extent to being basically meaningless. you ever read 17776. its take on space exploration always stuck with me

133. Favourite lyrics right now?

not to quote astasis again but its lyrics are so fucking funny ive been repeating them in my mind for months

and

141: night or day?

both have their benefits. i fucking love sleeping however. although this Is a bonus to night, i’m going to have to go with day <3

[emberglowfox]

17 FUCKING 776 BABY LETS FUCKING GOOOO

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 2/8/22

lots of short things this week. snacks, perhaps. bite-sized. little nibbles of content, even. no recipe edition, trying out a thing where i talk more about how i stumbled across a thing

listening i have never had a listening party or a youtube watch party go well or be even halfway enjoyable, but my housemates’ and my music taste overlap in such weird ways that sitting around adding things to a queueueueueueue and shouting about how girls are hot was super fun. shout out to The cover of all time, rina sawayama’s enter sandman. this breaks my cover rule, in that i don’t normally like a cover unless it’s radically different from the original, but i like this very crisp and clean version way more than metallica’s version

undefined

reading fallow week. i do want to shout out this specific sentence that made me laugh like a hyena. came across this chefs kiss of a sentence bc i like gita jackson’s work and make a point to read all her stuff

Former New York Times commentator Bari Weiss, currently running a Substack newsletter that is the single thing standing between the United States and the dark tyranny described in Warhammer 40k,

watching yes i saw the two hour nft video bc of who am i am what i do for a living, no i do not want to talk about it on my free time.

love secret base, hate sports, simple as. got here through the 17776-> john bois twitter -> secret base pipeline, bc he does fucked up sports video game stuff for them like this. apparently professional players are either very good baseball pitchers or very good baseball hitters and there’s very little overlap? why is this?? are the biomechanics that wildly different???

undefined

playing shoutout to Flick Solitaire, whose devs have been getting a lot of shitty reviews and flack in the app store reviews for commissioning a card set with Black hairstyles called My Hair Is My Crown. this is a two-man dev team who have built a perfectly serviceable little app. i don’t know that i like the feel of flicking cards as opposed to tapping them, but the app supports both and it’s much prettier and more colorful than my previous solitaire app, bc the game of solitaire itself is just engaging enough to keep my attention wandering when i’m tryign to listen to podcasts. how did you find this one kay? well, a new professional contact on linkedin posted a little cheer-up comment in one of the devs’ linkedin posts asking for advice about what to do about this barrage of bad reviews. game discovery! it happens everywhere!

also, Globle. wordle but for countries? monday’s was a tiny caribbean island nation that took me 24 tries. i think if a version of this existed that was JUST overseas territories of various countries i would be much more interested, bc there’s surprising shit all over the place and right now it’s very easy to quickly narrow down the general area of the daily country. think this one was in a kotaku article, which i do not have on my rss feed but check a couple times a week for like. temperature checking?

making added a loveseat and a coffee table to the evil lair and im a little cranky i did not do this earlier, but this house is BARREN okay we are putting together basically everything together from scratch. NOW we have a comfy place to have afternoon tea bc my housemate got real fucking hype about it, i did not have the heart to say “i don’t want to do this” and then it ended up being a ton of fun anyway and i found a bunch of new music to mull over.

this is the exact loveseat i had in college, but mine used to be sort of a denim? a joveseat, or a juton, if you will. this is bc i forgot that this company is not very good at accurately representing colors, bc i thought i was getting a light tan loveseat and instead got a pale grey. it doesn’t make a ton of difference in the room but it was momentarily startling as i ripped the packaging asunder

the blanket, as you may recall, was one of a number of pieces looted from an estate sale last summer. likewise with the round chair, which is very pretty but very uncomfortable.

the coffee table is off craigslist, bc i thought to myself “i want a glass coffee table so the openness of this gigantic room is preserved a little bit” and this was the one in the sweet spot of available, interesting, and cheap. it weighs about as much as the loveseat.

the secret to an eclectic house style is using every wood tone at once, i think, bc there’s a wall of birch veneer bookcases just out of frame and a dark knotty pine TV stand.

[hoarding-stories]

I was rereading 17776 since 20020's coming out now and I forgot how deep it gets. Like, here's a passage near the end of it:

"All the buildings were built, all the cars were neatly parked, all the garbage cans were bolted to the sidewalk, by people who were afraid to die. It was the meticulous craftsmanship of terrified people.

We didn't know we'd have each other for good. Back then was real fear. Real worry. The world was all fucked up. I remember feeling so alone. Like I was the only one fighting it.

We were all in it together, though. Every stranger you ever met, they were fighting the very same fight you were. Of course, you didn't talk about it with them, but all of us saw that terror, the terror any mortal person has. That terror wasn't natural. No other creature in the universe woke up every morning knowing it was guaranteed to die one day. Just us. Nobody should have to live with with that. It's too much, it isn't right. No one should ever have to bear it.

But we did. We all stared it down and kept on going. And we did it together, we were all in it together. It felt lonely, but we were never alone.

We all had each other, no matter how often we forgot it. All of us, we always had each other."

How am I supposed to just go on with my day after reading that?!?

[andwalkedaway]

this isn’t an original sentiment in any way but. 17776. fuck i love it so much

[green-day-dad]

i’m juice

[peysk]

look i can’t fucking pretend i don’t like homestuck. as a kid it had literally every thing i loved in it and it kept having it and then it ended. and i loved it so fucking much and all the music and art and cosplay. Like. my former homestuck friends now speak of homestuck with disdain and they’ve gotten over it but i dont feel like that’s how i want to be. Homestuck was weird, everything about it was weird and interesting. And like. Sure it was filled with flaws but id love to see more stuff like that. japanese experimental idol art pop shoegaze.post rock minanaro was the last non homestuck thing to scratch my brain in just the right way and i love it. when i got around to reading 17776 by jon bois it fucking left me vibrating like a bell for weeks. I just love things that are made with care and art with the intent of making something odd. I can’t overlook that. 

[3pblueberry]

book recommendations!

how to survive camping: uhh i kinda trailed off reading this one but man it’s good at the start. great main character, and the man with the skull cup is just the right amount of distant. also yes scary monsters. 9/10

eugenisis, james roberts: tf fanfiction for the incurably masochistic. agony. hope. ten billion words of robot murder and death, enjoy. 9/10

garfield, jim davis: i spent a not insignificant amount of my time this year reading garfield comics lol. 🐱/10

school zone girls: eh. not my thing but it could be yours. pretty solid yuri. 6/10

17776, jon bois: not that big into football, but some of this guy’s articles are pretty interesting. 8/10

this is going to hurt, adam kay: fuck, man. hilarious. horrible. diary entries of a junior doctor. quick excerpt so you get the gist:

funny and heartbreaking. i still pick it up and read it every now and again. yes/10

[junker-town]

20020: Questions and answers

The world of 20020 is a very strange one, and people are right to have questions. Jon answers some of them here.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun working on a project than I did with 20020. It was a long time in the making, as was this website, Secret Base. We intend this to be a place where we tell stories, whether they happened last night, a hundred years ago, 18,000 years from now, or some nightmarish video game realm that exists outside of time. In that sense, 20020 doesn’t define this place. Secret Base is the place where something like 20020 can actually live. I don’t want to get too overdramatic; Secret Base is a website where me and a bunch of of other jerks make shit we hope you’ll like. It’s a place I love nonetheless.

I started planning 20020 about three years ago, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just writing a sequel to 17776 for its own sake. This time I wanted to piece together a single, cohesive story, rather than a series of loose vignettes. I also wanted to explore certain themes more specifically. What happens to the concept of time if time becomes infinite? What defines a “good game,” and can it be laid out completely by accident? Who are Americans – specifically, these Americans, us? What the Hell is this place, and what was it? What would we do with ourselves if we actually got everything we wanted?

I tried to make something bigger and better than 17776, rather than just bolting on another installment. Personally, I feel like I did, but ultimately, those of you who have read it can be the judge of that. At any rate, thank you so much for reading. I know it was a big ask of you – not only is it roughly as long as a book, it’s a mashup of two things that typically don’t go together. A lot of you came in with zero interest in American football, and a lot of you came in without any particular inclination to read a work of science fiction where humankind never explored space because it was too boring.

A couple of people deserve an extra-special thanks here. Graham MacAree edited the piece from start to finish, and help me close as many logical loopholes as we could, picking out every time a player broke a rule, or one rule was inconsistent with another rule. Throughout the whole process, Graham was totally bought in, and was always in favor of making it more weird over less weird.

Meanwhile, Frank Bi engineered the entire thing so it could actually exist on the Internet. I’m still amazed that some of these pages weigh upwards of 50 megabytes, and yet they scroll completely smoothly without glitching out and slowing down. Frank also built an app on the back end that allowed us to easily format things like dialogue.

Anyway. Earlier this week, I solicited any questions you might have had about 20020 – why I made it, how I made it, how the game works, or literally anything else about it. I received a few hundred of those, and while I couldn’t get to all of them, I’ve answered as many as I could. Thanks so much for sending them in.

* * *

I haven’t read it yet - is it good?

– Anonymous

yeah

20020 feels a lot lighter than 17776. Why did you decide to go with that tone?

– hali

It’s interesting to me that it struck that tone with you, and I’m actually glad it did, because at some points the story actually felt slightly darker to me than 17776 did. I had a couple of priorities this time around.

The first was to continue to avoid what I hopefully avoided in 17776, which was writing some kind of morality play. I am tired of reading stories and watching shows that are trying to teach me some kind of lesson. I’m a grown adult! You’re a television, I don’t want to learn concepts like “right and wrong” from you! Fuck off, loser!

Instead, I mean 17776 and 20020 as open-ended explorations of themes and concepts. It’s so great to see people walk away from them with different ideas. Some people see this post-scarcity eternal playpen as Heaven, some see it as a completely nightmarish existence, and some see it as a sometimes-promising, sometimes-unsettling in-between. Far be it from me to call it one way or the other.

when designing The Bowl Game, how bogged down did you get in rules/technicalities? a game of this scale seems so hard to effectively govern, and many readers seemed to get stuck on rules technicalities that didn’t affect the plot much. i guess a better way to phrase this question is: did you develop the rules of the game first and then write a plot around them, or did the rules emerge naturally as you wrote?

– Victoria (@dirtbagqueer)

This was by far the toughest part of the whole thing. The field itself actually inspired the entire story.

Early in 2018, a few months after finishing 17776, I had a little bit of time in between major projects, and that’s when I started drawing up the fields. The geometry and weird aesthetic of it fascinated me. At the same time, I had absolutely no fucking idea what to do with it. I wanted it to make some sort of sense somehow. I wanted to design actual good, solid gameplay within it, but I just could not figure out how to do it. Over the course of two years, I would occasionally open it up and stare at it, practically begging for some kind of solution to present itself.

It never did, and my stupid ass finally got the point: this thing is a tribute to chaotic, senseless institutions. It’s a monument of the absolute nonsense that spews forth from ostensibly rational architecture. Like, imagine the most grating, insulting, senseless corporate drivel you’ve ever heard. To me, this that in the form of a football field.

It all clicked from there. Who would come up with such a bewildering and obnoxious thing? Obviously, Juice would. He’s amused by the literal interpretations of things and he delights in inanity and chaos. I needed Ten to hibernate, because she loves well-considered, intelligent gameplay, and she would have shot him down at every opportunity.

From there, I just wrote the rules in accordance with what I felt would be the most interesting story. After looking at San Diego State’s sad little field, I realized I wanted them to star in the A-plot, and I’ll admit to writing some of the rules in service of their story.

Chapter 4’s Georgia Quarterback is introduced to us by screaming into a phone for a pizza that never gets to him. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time and I have to know, was there something or some things that inspired it?

– @Kay_N_B

That guy’s ripped straight out of real life. I used to work at a call center doing tech support for an Internet service provider. Legend has it that if you simply yell REPRESENTATIVE or SUPERVISOR to an automated system enough times, it will get you off hold and talking to someone more quickly. This was definitely not true, but it didn’t stop people from trying.

On one occasion, I picked up the phone to a woman yelling SUPERVISOR! SUPERVISOR! SUPERVISOR! SUPERVISOR! over and over and over. She was yelling it so loud that she couldn’t hear me. Or, more likely, she was just holding the receiver to her mouth without actually holding the speaker to her ear. At any rate, I just could not get through to her. After about two minutes of that, I hung up. Sometimes I wonder how much longer she sat there yelling like that.

Is Lori from the Illinois chess chapter the same Lori who talked to the Durabos in the Koy Detmer chapter in 17776?

– Ale

She is! Not for any particular reason, other than that I liked the idea of bringing someone back. She’s named after my fourth-grade teacher and ninth-grade science teacher.

Why do trains still run on diesel fuel and how does this not affect the climate/environment?

– Vince

In this universe, humans have learned how to perfectly synthesize fossil fuels that are environmentally harmless. (That’s why I was fine with Nick just carelessly pouring gallons of diesel fuel on the ground while he was fueling the train.) In my optimistic view of the real-life future, I’m sure we’ll opt to solar power or some other environmentally benign solution, but these peoples’ insistence on fossil fuels reflects what does and doesn’t change about you if you live for thousands of years. If there are no coming generations to prod you along and find solutions of their own, how much would we really be compelled to change?

That’s a foundational theory of this story, however right or wrong: change happens generationally far more than it does internally. Once we grow up, the cake’s baked. With no generations to come, there are no more agents of change, and we’re the same old slobs. I’m going to want to smell gasoline when I mow the lawn.

What would happen if a team relocated its stadium? Or repainted the field within their existing stadium at a slight angle?

– Dave

Another fundamental theme of this story is that humanity, or at least America, is very, very preservationist. Architecturally, very little has changed, because there’s a sense that if things change, they’ll never truly get back what they once had. Whether or not that’s healthy is entirely up for debate.

Someone in the 20020 thread (apologies, can’t find the comment and don’t remember who it was!) had the idea of one school building an apparatus underneath their field that would allow it to rotate. This would be both fascinating and an absolute nightmare to calculate/write, but I loved that.

How did you create the animations and videos and such with Google Earth?

– @xyleb_

Google Earth allows you to import image overlays and slap them over the terrain. It took me a long time to figure out how to get 111 image files to stretch all across the country without the frame rate slowing to like three frames per second. In the end, it was a matter of making the field image files just about as small as possible (20x1 pixels) and stretching them from coast to coast. Given that Google Earth was never intended to do anything like this, I’m kind of stunned by how well it worked.

How do you choose the names for the players? Are they based off people you know or do you just make up names you think sound cool?

– Arp1033

When it comes to naming characters, my biggest screwup was naming the Georgia Tech quarterback Connor O’Malley. Conner is a very, very college football quarterback name, so I just bullshitted a last name that I thought would fit. Not only is Connor O’Malley an actual public figure, he’s actually a guy I’m a fan of and have been aware of for some time, and yet I somehow never connected those dots until a reader pointed it out.

I tried to give lot of consideration to the naming of characters. Since I prioritized representation, I did want to signal that certain characters were Black, or Hispanic, or Asian. Sometimes this was because I felt it was essential to their character, and sometimes it was just for the sake of representation.

In a couple of circumstances, such as the UAB Steamroller poster in which I named literally 125 characters, I partially relied on name generators. Even with those, you have to be careful. At first, I used one that allowed you to generate names that are traditionally women’s names, or more typically Black names, or Asian names. So I was like, all right, give me 50 women’s names, and it returned a bunch of names like Heather and Sally and et cetera. Yes, of course there are Black women named Sally and Asian women named Heather, but if they all have such names, that doesn’t feel entirely representative. So I requested 20 typically Black women’s names, and like six of them were Keisha. All right, cool, thanks! In that case and a few others, I just ditched name generators entirely and took first names from people I’ve known personally.

If I recall correctly, in the 17776 q+a, you talked about Nines identity a little bit and how you wanted to include an NB character in your stories. In this story, is Nine using they/them pronouns a decision they have made to identify as NB?

– Anonymous

Yep, Nine is non-binary. In 17776, Nine was non-binary simply by virtue of only having been conscious for a few days and not even having the time to examine or consider it. But now it’s been a while, and they actively identify as NB.

do you plan on bringing back any other space probes, like hubble in ‘76?

– scotty

Yes! I’ll spill the beans on that now. Hubble was originally going to appear in 20020, but there was just too much other stuff to get to. He’ll be seen in 20021.

how do you manage to find the “non-dull” part of each of the stories you write? like how do you find the newspaper clippings, names, etc?

– Carter Briggs (@carter1137)

Before I started writing, I spent two whole months just scrolling across every single field. If I hit a town, a lake, a mountain, or even a road with a weird name, I’d stop and search the newspaper archives to see if I could find anything interesting. This was definitely a test of Nancy’s sentiment in 17776 that you can’t walk ten feet in American without running into a story.

Technically speaking, it turns out that this is more or less true, but the vast majority of these stories are UNBELIEVABLY FUCKING BORING. As far as a lot of town are concerned, if anything interesting ever happened there, it sure as Hell didn’t make the papers. I’d say a good 10 percent of old newspapers are just, “Mrs. Hubbard took a trip here to visit her sons.” Just a 19th-century proto-Facebook check-in app. But one time out of a hundred, I’d find out about the James gang’s forgotten stash, or the Stannard Rock Lighthouse, or the escapes of Eugene Jennings, and it was all worth it.

I feel really, really gratified by those. I’m not so sure anyone has explored American history the way I did – by literally drawing lines across it and following those lines. It’s a very silly, stupid way to do it, but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found some of these things that would otherwise have been lost to history.

What do the probe’s voices sound like over the phone? Synthesized? Uncannily human? Like a Siri kind of thing?

– Anonymous

They sound human, yeah. How exactly they sound, I can’t say, but I can kinda hear Juice. Despite being French, I hear him as a fast-talking, hyper-charismatic, high-energy Southern dude, like some guys I grew up around. Think some weird amalgamation that’s reminiscent of Matthew McConaughey and Chris Tucker.

what is the answer to nines postscript(what happens when a ball is on a intersection)

– Anonymous

So when a ball is on Field A, and it crosses Field B at an intersection, the scoreboard doesn’t change. It still belongs to Field A, and only transfers to Field B if the player makes a turn.

What do video games look like in the year 20020? Do they still make new games or do they just kind of permanently update the old ones, like an MMO or something?

– Ben

This is not necessarily canon, and is just my real-world feeling on the matter seeping out: the real frontiers in gaming aren’t about graphics or technical ability or anything like that, they’re about creativity and art. Like, Breath of the Wild? That plays at 720p on my Switch, and while it’s artistically breathtaking, I think that strictly from a technical perspective, it could have been made 10 or 15 years ago. And yet it’s probably the greatest video game ever made.

Was there always an intention to do multiple parts (17776, 20020, 20021), or did that evolve as you wrote? What does the idea generation stage look like for a story as massive and out there as this one?

– @stxnmxn

When I finished 17776, I knew I wanted to write a sequel at some point, but didn’t always imagine it in two parts. As recently as this summer, I’d planned on writing it all at once before Graham and I decided to break it up. I’d just found too much stuff to condense it into one thing.

Did you have fun writing it?

– benfrosh

yeah

ballground & ballplay — how did you think to link them to this story? were you looking for them? when did you make the connection to the fields?

– @heysihui

That was an unbelievable coincidence! Clemson’s field just ran across both of them. I knew for sure I wanted to talk some about indigenous peoples, and I’ve long been fascinated with the seemingly far-flung concept of replacing war with sports. It was just the perfect opportunity.

I loved how in 20020 there are so many smaller stories being retold, some of which even affect the larger story. Of all the places big and small visited over the course of 20020, which location had your favorite historical event? I think mine was the 1910 Emory Gap runaway train.

– @jj_jjjjj_jjjjjj

The story of Eugene Jennings takes it for me. I was so profoundly touched by the story of a guy who had an incredible gift for escaping. He wasn’t an evil person, he was just born into a world he wasn’t compatible with. I think lots and lots of people like him have lived and died, and I hope we don’t forget them. You can barely find anything about Jennings on the Internet; his story could only be found in old newspapers. I’m honored I got to tell his story. I sure as Hell won’t ever forget him.

first of all, thanks for making an explicitly lgbt couple, one where the romance is directly shown, part of your main cast for 20020. did you really give much thought to it, or was it a decision that felt natural?

– jijo, @optikalcrow

Part of the reason I wrote 17776 in the first place was to take football, which I view to be this spectacular, fascinating thing, and imagine a world where it’s opened up to every single type of person. A long while back, a friend and I were talking about football. He’s gay, and he supposed that while football seemed like the sort of thing he’d like, he never got into it growing up because he “never got the invite.”

So I did that as a means of sending an invite. More generally, I really liked the idea of making a gay couple the main characters because I almost never see that anywhere, and if I do, it’s probably a story about them being gay.

As I did last time, I wanted to represent people completely matter-of-factly. I don’t delve into the experience of being gay, because I don’t have valuable perspective to offer there, but I did want to establish Nick and Manny as fleshed-out, imperfect, warts-and-all human beings. Sometimes they argue, sometimes they make a bad call, sometimes they say stupid things, and sometimes they’re unsure of themselves, just like everybody else.

who is your favorite character to write for?

– @mwuffie

It was a lot of fun writing Nick and Manny’s pointless arguments. Mimi was great too, since she was inspired by a few people who are very close to me. But Bryce, the new Troy recruit from Chapter 10, might be my favorite.

I grew up around so many guys exactly like Bryce. A young guy who’s not sad, really, just mopey. He’s an asshole in a mostly benign way. He seems to want to do nothing but just sit in a parking lot smoking menthols and leaning against his Nissan, and mumble something about wanting to challenge someone to a street race but never, ever actually doing it. He doesn’t seem to actually like or dislike or want anything. You have absolutely no clue what makes him tick or what ever motivates him to do anything, or whether he likes you. He’s just kinda there, but you get the sense that he’s perfectly content. He fucking rules.

I also enjoyed hate-writing Chess Guy. I never bothered to give him a name because he didn’t deserve one. When Graham first read that chapter, the first thing he told me was, “I fucking hate chess guy.” Mission accomplished.

juice mentions in ch 7 that he worked with indigenous tribes to get permission for fields/players to cross native land (which, of course, all of america is native land). some tribes said no — are these tribal lands OOB and/or handled in the rules?

– lily b.

Yep, for the indigenous peoples who did not grant permission, those portions of the field are out of bounds. Some also have special conditions – for instance, a limit on how many players can be on the field at the same time. These changes aren’t reflected visually on the map for two reasons: first, I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it from a technical sense, and second, I didn’t think it was particularly important or appropriate for me to guess which tribes would and wouldn’t grant permission.

Why hasn’t technology really developed that much? Besides the nanobots, there really isn’t anything else. They still watch/follow games through normal tv’s/radios. Just wondering how boring this must be for anyone not involved in the football games.

– permian triassic extinction event

I think old people just like what they like and don’t need much more, and these are the oldest people in history. Just like folks from decades ago were perfectly fine with their three TV channels and crossword puzzle, I think we’d be okay with an eternity of, I don’t know, online gaming.

Not to be a downer but at times I felt almost guilty about this future with nothing left that needs to be done while we live in this society that’s a total hell-hole for so many. Did you have any feelings like that while writing? Is there a message here linking our harsh reality with the immortal 20020 world that went over my head?

– Anonymous

These times are full of struggle and defeat. The thing I want most and believe in most for this country and this world are things I might never get to see for myself. But god damn it, I will imagine them. It’s practice for the real thing. I believe that one day we’ll actually have the world we want, and we’d better have a plan when that day comes. What are we gonna do with it?

Is it pronounced 20020 or 20020

– Mylograms

20020, yeah.

Any other questions? Graham and I will be hanging out in the comments sections for a while, so feel free to yell at us down there.

[c1qfxugcgy0]

So the latest thing by Jon Bois, 17776, is making the rounds. Which is interesting, since he already wrote a magic realism future football piece with Google Earth graphics back in 2014, called The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles.

TTCC is an interesting work. I can’t say I regret reading it, but I also can’t really recommend that you read it either. It’s like Lost, or Homestuck.①

TTCC is the story of a single 3 million yard long football game. It starts in Toronto, and stretches across Canada. It’s full of weird little Achewood-like character moments. It rhymes with Jason and the Argonauts. It also features maybe the grimmest setting I’ve seen outside of Warhammer 40K. The hopelessness of the world of TTCC plays out in small ways.

(Spoilers follow)

Tebow. How come you've got a wheel?

Driver. How come I've got a wheel?

Tebow. Yeah.

Driver. So ... I can drive the elevator.

Tebow. Do you need to steer it, though?

Driver. Nah. I always just drive the elevator straight up or straight down. Those are pretty much the only directions that folks need to go on an elevator. Do you need to go left or right? I could see what would happen. Never done it.

Tebow. No, thanks. Just up.

The Canadians, unfortunately, are in the process of innovating themselves into a corner. They're developing new technologies, and adapting new modes of living, that save and generate as much wealth, resources, and energy as they'll ever need. It's all being produced in such abundance that employment is becoming unnecessary to acquire wealth. This is an unexpected problem for Canadians, who are a considerably industrious people. They want to work. And so initiatives have recently been implemented to create "make-work."

This elevator is an example of that: contractors were assigned to equip it with a steering column that may or may not attach to anything. It's equipped with life vests. It has a flare kit. These were all installed by people who worked for the sake of work. So does this man, who has gripped this steering wheel every day for years, and has never turned it.

The central question of both TTCC and 17776 is this: What do we do? What is the purpose of life? If you don’t have to work, then what do you work on? If nobody needs you, what do you do?

I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.

Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.

Nobody in the history of human civilization has a come up with a satisfying answer to this question. Unfortunately for us, finding an answer is becoming a pressing matter, as technology gets closer to actually giving a post-scarcity economy, and if we can’t figure out something sane to do with it, late capitalism will give us its default answer: an endless dystopian hellscape, eternal suffering and deprivation without end.

Bois does have an answer. It’s this: the purpose of humanity is to play sports.

Tebow and friends drive the football for millions of yards, and eventually discover Tahimik, a city founded in Greenland by the ancient Polynesians. There they discovered all the physical laws, and invented all the technology.

Melvin: How did humankind go from the hot-air balloon to the supersonic SR-71 spy plane, which travels at Mach 3, in, what, 63 years? Do you really think a civilization of people can advance to that technology if nobody feeds it to them? Consider also that we didn't have a reliable cordless phone in 1990, and we had an iPhone in our pocket 17 years later. People accepted this as true because no other possibilities were really suggested to them. But take a step back and think, really think, about how the Hell that is possible, unless another party gives them this stuff an an accelerated rate.

That's what we did. That's what we've done for nearly 3,000 years. Every now and then, we very quietly leak a new technology to our agents in the rest of the world. That's how you got the sailing ship, the steam engine, the automobile, and the Sega Dreamcast, and that is how you will get things you can't even yet conceive of.

But not so many things. Here is the truth: we are running out of stuff.

Tebow: How is that possible?

Melvin: Very soon, we think, we will have cured every disease, solved every economic crisis, made every season of every TV show that anyone would conceivably want to watch. And then we'll be out of stuff. We're gonna release the greatest smartphone of all time sometime in the 2050s. That, I figure, will be the last thing.

[...]

Melvin: Around the year 1500, we hit a wall. We precisely mapped every star that has ever sent light in our direction. And then we start to realize that virtually all of it is a place we can never reach.

Humankind can't travel much further than our solar system. Astral physics won't allow it. Our human bodies won't allow it. Faster-than-light travel is impossible. All the teleportation business that we keep dreaming up in movies is absolutely impossible.

We know that quantum mechanics are in motion everywhere, but around that time, we also discover that we will never be able to comprehend or explore this, either. We stubbornly fought against this truth. God, how we fought. But it was like telling yourself that if you stare at a glass of water hard enough, it'll turn into wine. We were used to running into barriers a handful of times before we figured ways around them. But at this point, we just kept on circling around and hitting our heads on the same, impenetrable wall, thousands of times, forever.

There are things we cannot do. Humankind can travel to a handful of planets so barren that we'd never want to visit them anyway. Apart from that, we are stuck here. Forever, and ever, and nothing can be done about it.

[...]

Means. It's impossible. There has to be more to discover, more to create.

Melvin. Well, by all means. Would you like your smartphone to have a terabyte of memory? Sure, we can do that. Do you want to go to Mars? Be our guest. You can stand there for 20 minutes and look at all the nothing, and then we'll bring you back.

Means. You just haven't tried enough. You haven't given yourselves enough time.

Melvin. Do you realize that it's been 500 years since we ran out? Do you realize how many epochs that is, by our standards? We invented the Atari 2600 on a Monday in the year 783. By Saturday, we had made the PlayStation 6. We know what it is like to discover so quickly we can barely process it.

In TTCC, science and technology is over. Not only is it over, but it’s been over for centuries. There’s no ideas left to discover, and no places worth exploring.

What’s left? Sports!

Melvin: You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.

We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.

It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.

A parallel, from 17776:

9: We don’t ... do anything, right? There’s nothing we’re supposed to be doing?

10: Nope. We completed our mission 15,000 years ago.

9: So now we just... hang out. We perpetually hang out. Just like all the people down there, we shoot the shit, and watch football, and waste time.

[...]

10: A human being will rarely admit this to you, but they tend to be terrified of living forever. They were born and raised with the understanding that their lives would end. They achieved everything they wanted to achieve, all the ills that plagued them.

10: And now boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustain them. Football sustains them.

So far, this is just regular weird. It gets weirder!

Through a series of contrived explanations, it transpires that, to avoid an energy crunch resulting from running out of oil, the US has converted all football stadiums into solar power collectors.

Crouch. The government seized almost every sizable football stadium in the country, and retrofitted them into permanent, single-purpose buildings for one purpose. Collecting power. Football was left without a place to play.

Tebow. Just ... just take a season off football! Just wait until you build new stadiums somewhere else!

Crouch. The crisis had already left the economy staggering. Nobody had the money for all that, Timmy. College and pros combined, that's over a hundred huge stadiums you're asking for them to build, just like that.

Hall. More than that, then. Take five years off. Ten.

Crouch. I think you're overestimating the patience of the American people. They have moved on. Build all the stadiums you want. America has moved on.

[...]

Williams. Most NFL teams went out of business years ago. The rest play on old high school fields. A game might draw 500 people, if it's a big game.

Bois has constructed a fictional universe where nothing matters and human endeavor is pointless, except for sports, set a football player as the viewpoint character, then killed football. 

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Nereida Volquez. Tim. Dante said he still hasn't heard back from you.

It's not healthy, Timmy ... you gotta let go of football. Come along with us, remember it and what you loved about it, but let it go. Think about it like this. Football was the most beautiful thing in the world, and you got to be there for the end of it. The end of what it was, anyway. Doesn't that make you feel lucky? To have seen it?

I just think about you sitting in the middle of that strip mall in the middle of Florida. Just baking in this big oven of ... I don't know, sadness?

Your reward for reading 40,000 words about a fictional game of football is... nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!

So you can see why I’m perhaps hesitant to recommend that you read TTCC! Plus, if you’re reading this sentence, I spoiled the entire plot.

In any event, 17776 seems to be hitting many of the same plot beats. Superhumanly tough football players. Themes of stagnation and pointlessness. Google Earth zooms. I’m not confident about the ending!

①:

So, do I recommend Homestuck? Should you drop everything and start reading it?

You can’t. Homestuck is over, and I mean over, not just that it isn’t updating. “Homestuck,” the masterpiece, was the event, the community, the shifting pace of updates, the constant chatter between fandom and author. Homestuck is done. If you missed it, you missed it.

②: There isn’t a footnote 2, I just wanted to complain about Jon’s intolerably shitty Twitter feed. He’s a decent long-form writer, but in the Twitter format he seems to lean on the Family Guy-style “repetition is humor” joke.

For a year, he tweeted “welcome to college football saturday”, every Saturday, even when no college football games were actually happening, then wrote a post about it. Okay, sure, that’s annoying, but at least he had a minimal excuse for doing it. But he kept fucking going! His feed is full of minimally funny shit like this. He seems to understand his tweets are bad, but still refuses to stop tweeting. Screw you, Jon! You suck! Log off!!

[vedajuno]

Hey, I need you, reading this post, to do me a favor right now and please fucking read this article. I don’t care if you don’t like football. Neither do I. I could give less of a shit about football. I can give you my upmost assurance that this article goes above and beyond the baseline premise of football, and that you will not feel at all like you have wasted time reading it. Please stop whatever you’re doing, empty all of your expectations out onto the floor, and then click this link. Trust me.

[thedragonagelesbian]

today i read all of 17776 and watched wall-e so like im def in that existential ‘what tf r we gonna do whats the future gonna look like’ kinda mood

but also with everything that happened in charlottesville today and yesterday

idk theres always a certain notion of having outgrown societal/social ills in a LOT of sci-fi (ESP in 17776 where like human culture is now predicated on the notion that 15,000 years was long enough to fix our planet and all of our problems and we can live out as our ideal) but that reality has never felt further away than it does now with the trump administration and the alt-right and literal fucking nazis marching on campuses and attacking people

[vore-scientist]

NOT VORE BUT STILL LISTEN UP

GO FUCKING READ 17776

GO RIGHT NOW AND LOSE YOUR FUCKING MINDS

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

YEAH THATS RIGHT, A SPORTS SITE ABOUT FOOTBALL I KNOW JUST TRUST ME ON THIS

I can’t explain what it is other than an experience in story telling

[worms-are-better-than-me]

Tag blogs you want to get to know better! Tagged by @lilithslameloungehideaway Nickname: Chance counts I guess? It's actually my middle name Zodiac sign: Scorpio Height: 6'2.5" (thought it was taller but something must have gone wrong measuring) Last thing you Googled: Whitney museum, so I could tell my lazy ass dad when it closed. Favorite music artist: Uh hahahahahaha fuck (tmbg maybe?) Song stuck in your head: Fuckin Seagulls from Star Wars bad lip reading. Last movie you watched: Logan, but I didn't finish. Too violent. What are you wearing right now: Rubin volunteer t shirt grey shorts and grey loafers with no socks. Why did you choose your URL: American gods coming out. The one with nunnyunini was my fav chapter of the book. What did your last relationship teach you: some people are just better as friends, yo. Religious or spiritual: Eh not particularly. I'm a skeptic when it comes to observable phenomena but I believe there's so much we don't know... I'm also fascinated by systems of philosophy, religion, magic etc. Favorite color: Red Lucky number: what Average hours of sleep: 8 out of college, 6 in it :,) Favorite Character: don't make me choose !!!! Currently maybe juice from 17776 but it changes almost daily. How many blankets do you sleep with: 1 or 2 (cept when I'm in a hotel then I treat myself. Dream job: museum educator researcher, with a side gig drawing comics and writing stories Tagging @edge-lorde, @jimmychakraborty, and @learningtobeatlife

[galaxyfrogbeta]

Rules: Answer 20 questions and tag 20 people @fluffyllamas22 I hate these things but you tagged me and I love you so I'm doing this Name: Liz Nickname: ANYTHING but lizzie Zodiac Sign: Aries 0u0 Height: 5'1 probably (I'm short, hush) Orientation: Panromantic Ethnicity: Caucasian Fav Fruit: Blackberries! Fav Season: Fall or winter Fav Book: *can't remember the last book I read sorry* Fav Flower: Spider Lilies Fav Animal: Crows! Coffee, Tea, or Hot cocoa: All of the above. Cat or dog: Cats are sneaky little shits, but Dogs are furry little shits (I like both) Fav Fiction Character: Right now? Juice from 17776 lol #1 Dream Trip: Anywhere but America rn (seriously what the fuck guys) When did i make this blog: Shit uhhhh, probs around Feb or March 2017??? Yeah that sounds about right Number of followers: 45 (holy shit there are so many of you where do yall keep coming from) So yeah that's a little about me, I guess. @indubitablydead @graphite-katanas @listlesscupcakes @deathbyanxietyanddepression @genuine-foxy-fan @ironinkpen @onceagainpirate @terezi-py-rope @magatronix Those are mostly all of my mutuals. Suffer with me guys >:]