#hypertext game

[nightcrawlerblood]

where have you gone? the tide is over you / the turn of midnight water’s over you / as time is over you, and mystery / and memory, the flood that does not flow... kenneth slessor (1901-1971)

the angles cut me when i try to think. the magnus archives, episode 65

hi ive been talking about this wip without any context for a while so here's some stuff about it :3 flood is a hypertext twine game about loneliness, distance, and redemption. set largely on an abandoned, ad-infested wiki for an obscure web novel, you play as a college student who tries to solve the disappearance of the only other member of her fandom and unravels a terrifying conspiracy in the process. it's inspired by makoto shinkai, chinese & korean folklore, and homestuck :)

💫 multiple endings

💫 asian m/f lead couple (play them as romantic or platonic!) + a whole bunch of fun npcs

💫 so much drama for a fandom that doesn't exist

💫 the horrors of post-elon musk twitter

💫 really terrible css

💫 a love letter to the tiny fandoms that raised you; to long-distance friendships; to the messy, lonely, lovely experience of neurodivergent teenagehood

✨ daphne / alice haeun nam / astarrygirl: biracial (white & korean). nyc. 2003. ex-deviantart girl turned pretentious conceptual art girl. doesn't play about her favourite ship

✨ jordan / chang yichen / v621: chinese. australia (ish?). 2003. evil woman enjoyer. they hated him for his autistic swag (and the killing)

✨ wren / chang yijia / lovelace: chinese. sg. 2006. mildly internet famous video essayist. really into world war 2 planes

[probable tws btw: depictions of suicide & suicidal ideation; depictions of harassment and stalking]

anyway this is a call for people who might be interested in being tagged ^_^ no pressure lol

[hypertextdog]

hi @hypertextdog followers and friends. it's that time again

the process of elimination (tpoe) <- play here

this is my interactive ergodic web fiction project, the process of elimination !!! ↴↴↴

it features six endings, a robust original soundtrack (by myself), and a number of visual artworks, including the banners visible above and the tpoe ost's album cover, by @notwerewolf. other information (including many content warnings) can be found on my homepage.

if that piques your interest at all, feel free 2 join the discord here!!

more info on it below ↴↴↴

tpoe is an exploration of isolation, control, surveillance, and early 2020's-era internet culture. you play as harry arsigne, a 14-year-old cat artist living ~alone with his overbearing father, scott, in a decommissioned lighthouse in the shoreline town of conder, connecticut.

making choices through personality test responses, you'll balance your two hobbies: exchanging personal histories with and seeking questionable guidance from the set of five eccentric criminals scott keeps in his d.i.y. prison cell in the lighthouse basement, and using his surveillance software to monitor the online activity of one wren wayer*, a rather pretentious local high school sophomore and twice attempted gamedev with whom you have an at times overwhelming obsession.

* that says "wren wayer" sorry dark mode users

it is a whole queer ordeal with honest deconstructions of modern online teenager-hood, including fandom and forum drama, gay parasocial love, e-childlabor, and destructive codependent ldr's. it's also a crime drama about a father whose overprotective affection manifests itself as a sort of religious zeal pertaining to disease, water purity, and fucked up architecture.

it is really good and i worked hard on it dudeee. play ittt join the serverrr thanks for reading👍👍

[dirtbra1n]

in other news I spat out nearly 1000 words of prev prez hypertext gamefic earlier in my avoidance of the other fucking thing. for an assignment so it counts. Watch this space

[united-in-cyberspace]

Does That Answer Your Question?

A game for trans women about taking control.

Link

[sayahomu]

i am a wheel with three thousand arms and i have never been more alone

finished a short hypertext poem, with a variant on the above illustration for each section

[otakunoculture]

More Love Sim than S4U: Citypunk 2011 and Love Punch

S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH is a unique #videogame simulation about #relationships and while it won't be for everyone, it's worth a try for #nerds prepping for #valentinesday

To play through a video game that is more hypertext driven than graphical can be a hard sell these days. Although the graphics are few and far between in S4U: Citypunk 2011 And Love Punch, thankfully there is some when the avatar decides to leave the computer. Just what U0U Games‘ latest product represents is quaint and a test of patience since reading all the dialogue is important. Technically,…

[thealchemyofgamecreation]

Words that Shape Worlds: Crafting a Cybertext Gaming Experience

In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts on how we can implement cybertext. #GameDesign

As a passionate gamer and avid reader, I’ve always been fascinated by the potential of storytelling in video games. The concept of cybertext, although sounding complex, is actually quite intriguing and relevant in today’s gaming world. In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts on how we can implement cybertext. First off, let’s break down what cybertext mean. Cybertext refers to texts that…

[manonamora-if]

Interactive Fiction Showcase 2024

Showcase your Game!

The Interactive Fiction Showcase is a year-long "jam" meant to collect and showcase Interactive Fiction games completed in 2024, and show how diverse the Interactive Fiction scene is! And maybe: build more bridges between the community, help people finding their new favourite game/author...

Whether it is long or short, an easy adventure or a complicated puzzle, a strange experiment, a quick creation, or a years-in-the-making game, come show off what you've made!

Are you more of a player? Then, come check this page regularly for new submissions! Maybe leave a rating or a comment too :)

This is an unranked event.

Rules:

The Showcase is open to IF games in all of its forms: kinetic, choice-based, hyperlinks, parser, visual novels... As long as it is Interactive Fiction (there is interactivity and the focus of the game is on the text), the entry will be accepted.

The Showcase is open to IF games in any language.

Entries must be playable and in its complete form when submitted. Completed games in 2024, whose demo was previously public, are welcome. Games submitted to other events (jams/competitions) are welcome.

Entries can include NSFW content, as long as it is indicated in the submission.

Entries should not include any generated AI content - or it will be removed.

Spam or hateful content will be removed.

Creating Interactive Fiction:

Interactive Fiction is a text-based narrative medium, where players can interact with the story in some fashion (input commands, click a link/button, press key). There are many different ways of creating IF, and many different programs to do so. You can find some mentioned below:

Primarily HyperText/Choice-Based: Twine,  Ink, ChoiceScript, Dendry

Primarily Parser/Input: Inform 6, Inform 7, PunyInform, Adventuron, ADRIFT

Other: Bitsy, Binksi, Ren'Py

and many more can be found listed in the IF Wiki.

If you are looking for other Interactive Fiction Events, discuss general IF, or ask question, you can visit the IntFiction Forum. (we also have monthly IF events over at @neointeractives)

Interactive Fiction Database and Archive:

IFDB

The IFDB, or Interactive Fiction Database, is an IF game information catalogue, creating a historical record of the IF landscape. The database is a community project, updated by its members, by adding titles to the directory, ratings games, writing reviews... If a listing has not yet been created for your game, please consider making one!

IF Archive

The IF Archive is an archive of Interactive Fiction games, and IF-related elements (walkthroughs, interpreters, articles, collections...). The Archive’s mission is to preserve the history and practice of interactive fiction and make it freely available to the public. If you wish to, you can upload a copy of your game to the IFArchive, through the IFDB listing of your game (recommended) or directly to the archive.

The IFDB and IFArchive, as well as the IntFiction Forum and Twine, are managed by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. These programs are funded through individual donations.

Visual Novel Database

The VNDB, or Visual Novel Database, is a community project that strives to be a comprehensive database for information about visual novels. The database is updated by its members, by adding titles to the directory, ratings games, writing reviews... If a listing has not yet been created for your visual novel, please consider making one!

[darudedogestorm]

For anyone who wants to try this game out, it has a free online demo that can be found HERE

Requested by anon

[plaidos]

whats homestuck and is it good

it's a very good webcomic exploring metanarrative through hypertext a complex transmedia hypertext comprised of gifs, narration, dialogues, audience suggestion, flash animations, games & music. it's a coming of age story about a repressed teenaged egg playing a special, life-changing videogame with his three best friends. truly worth reading all 8,000 pages of. my favourite piece of fiction of all time i think.

[swordfright]

Tell me about how the structure of the medium impacts the story 🔫

My brother in Christ, prepare yourself for the most boring essay you could possibly imagine. I'm going to over-simplify a few things here for the sake of Getting To The Point, so bear with me.

I think a good starting place is that DSMP is an example of New Media. The go-to definition most folks use is this one: that New Media are stories told via "communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content." In other words, NM is basically this category of stories made up of convergent elements, which satisfy a multimedia requirement, and are heavily reliant on both participatory fan culture and recent advances in technology that allow creators/audiences to communicate with one another instantly.

There's a couple ways you can understand DSMP as a New Media, but as far as I'm concerned, one of the most interesting is prosumption. The term "prosumption" describes a creative situation where a piece of art is being produced (at least in part) by the same people that consume it; they're both audience and creator. DSMP is a really great example of this phenomenon, because A) it's serial and therefore the CCs had ample opportunity to respond to and engage with the audience's reception of their story; and B) because the chat feature allows CCs to interact directly with their audience during roleplay rather than after the fact. These features, among others, kinda set the stage for DSMP to function as a highly prosumptive piece of media.

In particular, the stuff that interests me is the stuff to do with storytelling convention (genre, perspective, etc) and how prosumption turns all that on its head. There are a number of altercations in DSMP canon where the course of the story is altered because of real-time interactions between the CCs and their chat - particularly times when a CC's chat warns them about events happening at the same time elsewhere in the server. In this kind of scenario, the CCs are static, they can't really leave their own stream. Their viewers, on the other hand, are able to jump between streams and talk to each other to figure out what's happening in the overarching story. When this happens, viewers have choices to make: are they going to tell a CC what's going down on the other side of the server? If so, how are viewers going to communicate those events? Viewers are biased, they directly inform CCs, and the information they divulge (as well as how they divulge that info) goes on to influence CCs' actions and thus the events of the story, to some degree. In my opinion, this is a pretty new and exciting way to prosumptively construct a narrative! Media has always been interactive to some extent (especially serial works), but the interaction being live and in real-time is pretty significant in my view because it can exert unique pressures on a narrative.

Speaking of audience choice, that brings me to the next thing I want to yap about: ergodic storytelling, a term that refers to stories “negotiated by processes of choice, discernment, and decision-making.” For reference, a good non-MCYT example of this would be hypertext fiction, because it's generally characterized by the ability of the interactant (that's the reader, in this hypothetical example) to explore material provided by someone else, either as a kind of conceptual landscape (think setting in a video game), or as puzzle pieces that must be put together in order to give the interaction the "big picture" of the story. Basically, with hypertext fiction, there is a core text (the main document that forms the skeleton of the story) and there are multiple hypertexts branching off of the core text - and whether the reader ends up reading those branches, and in what order, inevitably shapes that reader's perception of the whole story.

So here's where it gets tricky. In the case of DSMP, where is the core text located? Is there any one identifiable core text at all? Or is it more appropriate to consider each individual stream or VOD as its own singular core text, with the related Twitch channels and Youtube recommended in the sidebar being "branches"? Alternatively, if the streams and recordings distributed on the server members’ official channels are the central text in the grand hypertext fiction that is DSMP, then can adjacent spaces where audiences do the work of creating and archiving lore be considered their own story branches? I don't have answers to these questions. No one does. That's part of what makes DSMP exciting.

To translate the above quote out of Academia Hellspeak: in an ergodic story, the audience has agency, but the agency enabled and allowed by the text varies in its intensity and mode. Yes, stories told ergodically necessitate choice — and therefore enable agency, turning the reader or viewer into interactant — but that element of choice doesn't always look the same. Some hypertexts are more choice-reliant than others, or are choice-reliant in different ways. So, rather than being a choose-your-own-adventure story, DSMP is more closely analogous to a story where the audience chooses the perspective through which they view plot developments, in addition to having some influence over how plot developments unfold.

(☝️From a 2021 Polygon article, if you think I sound crazy☝️)

The web of choices DSMP presents to viewers is very complex, even compared to other forms of choose-your-own-adventure game. Because each CC approaches the task of story-creation from their own angle (bringing their own narrative baggage to the writers’ room, so to speak), those shifts in perspective this Polygon article describes often also constitute shifts in genre. For instance, cc!Wilbur brought his music production experience and interest in musical theater to the server, cited operas and stage musicals as some of his main inspirations; and accordingly, much of c!Wilbur's most crucial arcs observably draw from those sources. When you watch a c!Wilbur stream, you’re watching a story about statecraft, about revolution, about the triumphs and tragedies of ego that play out during the process of nation-building. On the other hand, cc!Quackity has repeatedly identified Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as his primary influences; accordingly, his RP character’s story is closer to a piece of gritty prestige television in some places (especially LN series). Unlike with c!Wilbur, a lot of c!Quackity's tension does not revolve around a romanticized fantasy of revolution but around more personal conflicts: securing your place in a new regime, navigating exploitation as both exploited and exploiter, etc. In terms of both plot beats and character arcs, Wilbur and Quackity’s respective storylines embody many of the genre conventions the content creators are working within.

Moreover, a shift in genre often entails a shift in style or mode. Because cc!Wilbur was heavily inspired by musical theater, the presentation style of his character’s storyline is correspondingly both theatrical (i.e. only loosely scripted, nearly always televised live, and improv-heavy) and musical (featuring multiple instances of Wilbur singing in-character ballads and anthems.) On the flipside, Quackity’s streams (especially the later ones, since I'm mostly focusing on Las Nevadas era here) demonstrably mimic the prestige TV shows the CC draws his inspiration from, with lore sessions being pre-recorded rather than televised live, featuring distinctive sonic and visual aesthetics popularized by neo-Western thriller dramas. So, where a piece of media like DSMP is concerned, shifts in perspective entail shifts in genre, which in turn entail pronounced shifts in style. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's an entirely new story depending on which character the viewer decides to follow. In that regard, what initially appears to be a single choice (whose perspective to watch a plot event through) has the power to determine a wide array of other elements, as viewers’ responses to the options presented to them will decide the overall tone of the section of the story they're about to watch.

While I think the genre-switching is genuinely super cool, lately I'm a lot more interested in perspective-switching and how it's related to viewer empathy. One side-effect of DSMP being televised live is that yes, you can watch a plot event from 30+ different POVs, but you can't watch every POV live. Typically, you either have to switch between multiple streams, or you need to pick one streamer to watch live and maybe later you'll watch other characters' POVs as you see fit. This has an impact on your perception of how that plot point went down because watching something live feels very different from watching something after-the-fact. I haven't done study on this, so what I'm about to say is mostly conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if viewers felt greater empathy for (and greater degrees of kinship with) characters whose POVs they watched live.

The choice of which character to follow also has observable impacts on other kinds of narrative conventions (who is the main character of DSMP? the boring answer is c!Dream because the server's named after him, but the real answer is the protagonist is whoever's POV you watched most of the major plot events through) but to be honest, those questions don't interest me as much.

So, going back to perspective and empathy. I think viewers' reactions to Exile are a really solid way of exemplifying the thing I'm trying to say, so this is the part of the yapping where we gotta bring up the dreaded Exile discourse.

Even though the Exile VODs are available and new viewers can go back and watch them, those viewers experience the Exile arc in a way that is fundamentally different from the experience had by viewers who had to wait in between updates as the videos were being streamed serially in real-time. I would argue that viewers who were “present” during the whole arc noticeably felt the brutality of c!Tommy’s treatment to a greater degree, because the audience was effectively forced to sit in exile alongside Tommy’s character - stewing in anxiety, looking forward to the possibility of appearances from other characters, and living in fear of Dream’s next visit, etc etc. Obviously you could also make this point using c!Dream's time in Pandora as an example, but I'm using Exile here because I've actually seen a lot of fans bring this up when discussing the arc: "people who didn't watch live Don't Get It," "the reason newer fans don't see Exile as scary is because they didn't have to watch it live," that sort of thing. And while I have certain qualms with some of the implications here, I do think these are really fascinating responses! These sorts of responses show that viewers consciously perceive their viewing experience as having been fundamentally different from others' based on a temporal element that's unique to serial fiction!

This instance of a divergence in collective fan experience is an example of choice being rendered unavailable to viewers by virtue of the story’s structure and means of distribution; audience members who happen to accidentally miss streams or who begin following the story after major events have occurred will never be able to engage with and witness those events as LIVE viewers, merely as retrospective ones. They don’t get to make that choice, but they do get to make choices about which perspective (and therefore genre) they get to experience the story through. So it follows that each aspect of DSMP, a semi-ergodic story, can be categorized as either ergodic or non-ergodic, and whether a particular storytelling element is ergodic can change depending on WHEN the viewer began tuning in to the story.

I have a lot more shit to say (shocker) but I'm gonna cap it here for now. Though I do want to add that this is kinda why I have a lot of patience for the crazy diversity of interpretation you tend to get in DSMP fandom. If you took a random sample of fans and asked them what they think of various arcs, characters, and plot events, chances are they would all have fairly different things to say. To me, that's a feature, not a bug. Obviously I have my own opinions, and obviously I do think it's possible for a given interpretation to be "bad," i.e. not grounded in the text - but I have a lot more patience for it here, in a fandom where agreeing on what "the text" EVEN IS presents a challenge. We can't all agree on who the main character is, so I don't ever expect us to agree on more nuanced questions of theme and conflict resolution in the narrative. Again, that's a feature, not a bug. I don't think it was ever possible to reach a consensus with a piece of media like DSMP because of how inextricable the audience is from the story.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I've adopted adding <Lie> to the end of messages I send that aren't fully genuine or that I don't really believe for fun after seeing it used to tag dialogue in the Fallout games, but since I've picked up this series it's starting to feel like I'm getting called a liar in thought-speak

Hahahahhaah I feel this!

I've always assumed that the hypertext symbols around <thought speak> are a reference to the way that comics use <pointy brackets> to indicate speech that has been translated. Which is itself a reference to the use of «guillemets» to indicate dialogue in French or Greek text.

That said, if anyone knows if there's another origin for the convention, I'd love to hear it!

[hms-no-fun]

i just want you to know that i read... i think Most of godfeels and had to stop because i was not enjoying it. but i think its really good and i really respect what you do. i think it's all too easy for people to mix up "this is not my cup of tea" with "this is bad and/or problematic". they dont take the time to see the artistry in it, why it is what it is, what it might be saying beyond their surface level read and the kneejerk reaction to it.

i also wanted to note that ive always been kind of scared of sharing fanworks for fear of writing "out of character" - and ive also even been afraid of it in original works. character isn't real and concrete, so anyone can decide something's out of character. so your exploration of that concept gives me more confidence as a writer. i really appreciate that and everything else you do. :)

thank you so much for this message! i'm glad you tapped out rather than force your way through something you weren't enjoying, that's a very mature response and something i wish more folks would recognize as a perfectly valid option. in fact i think pushing through and reading long after you've given up on the material, so to speak, is a great way to wind up angry at a writer for having "forced" you to endure such a trying experience. as i've said before, an author can't force you to do anything. you can close the book any time you like.

as far as the tension of "in character/out of character" goes, i think a lot of people in fandom struggle with the fact that "character" is very much in the eye of the beholder. sub-groups form within fandoms based on identities, politics, sexual predilections, etc, and typically gather around the fire that is their particular interpretation of a character. but from within that sub-group, it's rarely considered "an interpretation" so much as the obvious intended truth of the text. it's that intoxicating mood of finding people who share a perspective you rarely see elsewhere, like oh my god, you GET it, finally someone GETS it!

in homestuck fandom, for instance, quite a lot of people hate vriska and think she sucks, with a vocal sub-group of that sub-group still actively beating the drum that everything about her arc after [S] Game Over is the worst part of homestuck. but i love vriska, and my corner of the fandom very much organized around a full-throated defense of her. some folks think homestuck did tavros and gamzee dirty and that this is a fatal flaw in the text; when i countenance these people, i am convinced we read two very different comics. who's right and who's wrong? there are degrees. i can pull out any number of quotes from andrew hussie about the importance of vriska and the weenieness of tavros, but then, authors love to say things, and there's plenty of stories i love in ways that directly oppose to the authors' stated intent. the debate can never end because we are only ever talking about the version of a character or story that exists in our heads, based on the things that stuck with us when we read the thing (however long ago that was-- which is important because i find a LOT of people adamantly defending their headcanons haven't read the source text in a number of years. as time passes, your perception of the media you've experienced in the past morphs and distorts. someone who was right five years ago can be wrong today and not even notice the difference).

something i've realized in the last year is how much godfeels emerged from a very specific milieu, not just in terms of how we interpreted certain characters but in our approach to analyzing and talking about the text altogether. i believe most of the important stuff in godfeels is "in character" in most of the ways that matter, but it's built on a very specific meta that centered vrisrezi and transness and radical leftist politics and experimental hypertext. really, it's a post-Epilogues fanwork even despite the fact that godfeels 1 predates their release by a few weeks. and i think to this day a lot of homestuck fans haven't read the epilogues but have read fandom posts about how terrible they are (quite a lot of which will have either been written by teens, by people who already didn't like homestuck very much, or by one of the regressive stalkery weirdos prominent in the homestuck reddit/discord), and that misapprehension keeps them in the dark about just how many amazing tools the epilogues introduce to the homestuck formula that exponentially expand the expressive possibilities of attentive fanworks. and it of course elides the fact that the homestuck epilogues are a story about being in your 30s. i think we'll be getting a big re-appraisal of the epilogues in 5-10 years. it'll be the "twin peaks: fire walk with me" of homestuck, just you wait.

so these readers see my version of dirk being an unhinged murderous dick to a newly-out trans woman and go "he would never do that." then if i point at the epilogues, they'll say "i didn't read them/they're not even canon/that wasn't in character either." at which point there's nothing really to say, because we have two completely different perceptions of the text. who's right and who's wrong is almost always infinitely subjective, a circumstance that humans are notable for being very good at handling in a mature and politely discursive manner.

so i've got an "author's introduction" to godfeels baking in my docs to provide some context about the meta this story is built on, the milieu it came out of, that sort of thing. it won't make much of a difference in practical terms, but it'll at least be something i can point to.

in any event, thanks for this message. all i ever want is for people to give it an honest shot. i hope you can continue harvesting confidence from wherever it can be found. it takes a lot of audacity and backbone to be an artist, especially when you have something worthwhile to say. remember that you're not writing for the haters, you're writing for the kind of person, like you, who wants to see more stories like the thing you're writing. they're the ones who'll get it, they're the ones who'll stick around long after the haters have lost interest.

[fanwork-exchange-promos]

Create Your Own Adventure: A Multi-Fandom CYOA Exchange!

Posted by: alana_exchange Dreamwidth Community • AO3 Collection Create Your Own Adventure is a multifandom fanfic exchange themed around creating multi-ending and interactive stories! The most famous of this style of story is the Choose Your Own Adventures gamebooks and their copycats (like Ryan North of Dinosaur Comic's To Be Or Not To Be, a Hamlet gamebook); interactive text-based games are the descendants of this form. And now... we'll be making hypertext gamefics! The exchange welcomes anything from AO3-only, simple adventures with HTML links between chapters to complex games written in Twine, Choicescript, or any other coding system of the creator's choice! With a low minimum (750 words, 3 endings) but decently long creation period, it welcomes both first-time novices to the format and experienced creators! NOMINATIONS & SIGNUPS: Sept. 27th ASSIGNMENTS GO OUT: Oct. 9th ASSIGNMENTS DUE: Nov. 4th REVEALS: Nov. 11 AUTHOR REVEALS: Nov. 18th comments via The Fandom Calendar https://ift.tt/8BcE75p

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Tuesday 2025-01-26

Got waylaid by situations, sorry. It will happen again.

Listening

The entirety of the BADBADNOTGOOD album BBNG2

Ya like jazz? Ya like big spooky electronic jazz? BBNG2 has it for you.

Reading

Working my way through Pale Fire by Nabokov. It's a very funny book, and also very odd. I can see why they call it perhaps the first hypertext!

The poem itself is 1000 lines in rhyming couplets with Vladimir "I Just Learned English And I'm Using The Whole Thing" Nabokov flair. It's very pleasing to read out loud.

Still working my way through the notes. The eBook I bought lacks the index so I had to pirate a copy for that. RIP Nabokov you would have loved Homestuck.

Watching

We had Megalopolis at Bad Movie Night. This movie is not good and a lot of it is straightforwardly shit but some of its failure modes are interesting.

This movie vacillates between looking pretty good and looking totally dogshit. I don't know if Coppola was trying to be like ooh what if I use an old fashioned looking rear projection technique for this elevator scene because Movies nah dog. It looks like garbage. A lot of this movie looks like it was a PS3 game cutscene, both in texture and in thoughtfulness of framing.

"Average man thinks about Rome every day" factoid actually a statistical error, References Coppola, who lives on a wine farm and thinks about Rome every twenty milliseconds, was an outlier adn should not have been counted. Seriously man so much of this movie is making a reference to a cool thing that Coppola has seen. Getting Adam Driver to deliver To Be Or Not To Be is so fucking tryhard.

Unfortunately when you write about utopias you put yourself in a very vulnerable position where you are saying not just that I think this way of living is good, but that everyone else should as well. This movie has some lines that would get you the Liberal award in Disco Elysium in two seconds flat. Adam Driver stands up at the end to give a huge speech about how we have to have a serious debate about the future. I pregamed this one with Metropolis (1927) and it also suffers from this. Yes Fritz I know you didn't know that the great war was gonna get a sequel but you can't just make a movie that's like "Communism is cool. But watch out!"

Look okay I hate big name actors in movies now. If you're going to sell your wine farm and spend one hundred million dollars making your thing, maybe don't spend so much money on candles Giancarlo Esposito. This is a thing that sucked about Cats as well. There's so many Guys in this movie and at no point did I ever want to call a guy by anything other than their real human name. I don't care if your name is Fundi that is Laurence Fucking Fishburne. Maybe get some normal actors, you have 100 million dollars, surely you can find some.

It's so funny to set a story about building fucking anything in New York City, The City That Hasn't Built Shit In 80 Years.

Playing

I've finished most of the major sidequests of Cyberpunk but I'm now doing Phantom Liberty and man the opening of Phantom Liberty is slick. I love it when a game makes you feel urgency even though there isn't any. It's one of my favourite video game tricks. Busy trying not to eat shit as I approach the crashed spaceship of the president of the New United States of America.

They finally put some good outfits in the game but they're all hidden inside Phantom Liberty! I walked up to the first clothing vendor in Dogtown and bought like half their stock. There's zany skintight leotards and cool helmets and bizzare transparent blazers oh my! Where is this shit in the main game.

Making

Spent a while debugging cursed filament on my printer, which was frustrating.

Ongoing design of small coffee table. Throwing away a lot of half-assed CAD models.

Tools and Equipment

If you have to use a mouse in a very confined space, you really should consider a trackball. Trackpads are all good and well but there's a reason why so many CAD platforms in workshops have a trackball superglued to an piece of sheet steel. One of my other projects is a lapboard for my HTPC setup and I have basically settled on "slotted in commodity trackball" as the ideal way to handle mouse input here.

[lesbianalanwake]

trying to build a habit of saving journalism articles that have stuck with me (and remembering which ones I've read over the years). some I've read recently and in the past:

The Dead World of Blippi. Speaks for itself!

Footprints in the snow lead to an emotional rescue. On the danger of the natural world and the power of fragile human connection.

A Maddening Sound: Is the Hum a mysterious noise heard around the world, science, or mass delusion? On the Hum, my favorite phenomenon.

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. The strange between space of a (mostly) empty virtual world; I also recommend the Exploring Dead Games videos by Redlyne on Youtube for a similar vibe.

Is Time an Illusion? // The Cosmic Origins of Time's Arrow // The Paradox of Time: Why It Can't Stop, But Must. These three articles on the nature of time, if you'd like to hurt your brain.

The Really Big One. On the potential for the catastrophic consequences of an earthquake along the Pacific Northwest's Cascadia fault line.

The Uncounted. On the devastating civilian casualties of U. S. air strikes in Iraq.

The trauma floor: the secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. Self-explanatory; very good, but watch out - I think reading this a few years ago did most of the work of turning me into something of a misanthrope.

The Curse of Xanadu. On the first hypertext project that preceded the Internet.

A ‘Last Hope’ Experiment Finds Evidence for Unknown Particles // To Observe the Muon Is to Experience Hints of Immortality. Two articles about the experimental significance of the muon particle and the uncertainty of staring into the vast unknown.