itch.io

yo, great job. your use of color is awesome. i love the filters on your images too. the placement of the text interacts with the images well.

on the poem itself, im still mulling it over. its very direct but the word count is pretty low so theres still a bit of interesting fill-in-the-gap to do. these summers are hot and exhausting and in my friend group on especially hot days we say it gives everyone "random asshole disease", by ratcheting up the ambient rat trap stuff we're all stuck in - i caught myself thinking a lot about that at first as your poem took shape. 

i think the art and styling is beautiful. it would be cool to see more of your influence on the GUI. i think a soundtrack would kick ass on this for sure, just to help set the tone. overall im feeling "give me more", which, good problem to have as a reader.

the tension between blythe and claire is really good, tho imo you bring the gun out too early on in the plot.

this was a really fun read. i liked the ways dante and mew were so poorly matched, talking past each other, unwilling to meet each others needs but too deep in to quit.

the jealousy of the reactions to the real disappearance of brokewing and the failure to launch of the ARG, the feelings of ownership over art and internet spaces, and stuff. it was nice.

a lot of work went into the atmosphere here and its really pretty. ladygosssoft is a great spot, dumpgirls is awesome. i miss websites with straightforward, unstimulating layouts. the imagery puts me right where i wanna be, and the sound is often really great. this was fun.

:face_with_hand_over_mouth_emoji:

glad to hear that the anhedonic episode let up on you, and to my pleasure, your hedonic viewpoints are headily enriching to me.

i've gotten the sense that people really want an incendiary scene-devouring heater out of work after reading the opening salvo, but i think that the negative/schizo/anhedonic stuff that you're targeting was definitely more my point over all - creating ambiguity, negative space, and the protective layers out of mood swings, and lying the outward rage at the start, crumbling and going wet and cold by the end. 

i really appreciate you calling out the complementary nature of the straight culture/queer culture scenes. i didnt want to create an illusion that queer communities are somehow a paradise or whatever. i wanted to create a backdrop that would make sense for someone to feel "I tried to run away, but in the end I couldn't escape, cuz im still surrounded by people".

i dont think that sarcasm is exactly correct for the afterword, yeah. that was originally the idea as a joke, before i actually wrote the story, but when i got to the end, i decided "the reality is i just hold two worldviews. what if im angry and im grateful?" i think in this particular scene that there can be a lot of value in anger that gratitude can't really replicate - i think people are often too nice or too dishonest with their dishonesty, and i think that anger can provide a cutting clarity in those kinds of situations. but also i wanted to do the jam and i wanted to have fun. im really glad that in the end it really spoke to you.

you'll eat your reality check, and you'll clean your plate, and you'll like it!

joking aside, thank you so much for playing. hearing this means the world from you, as Not Bernadette Mayer was kind of a mindmelter for me, in a big way, as I've touched on lightly already. I have enormous respect for your craft.

2 things on Time:

1. 2005 rules, you should tell stories set in 2005 if you have them to tell.

2. Getting old is crazy. Can't believe I made it this far. Thank God people don't change that much from one decade to the next and generations aren't really real.

this rips, i like your art a lot. music, woozy. writing dizzying.

My favorite entries of the jam this year are looking squarely at poverty, the impermanence of homes, othering, and how parents' ownership over their children under these systems compromises their mutual ability to connect. i put some other thoughts in the fluxer very flippantly earlier, before i had finished the game, and having finished, this story is quite painful. the violence aimed at: women, dark skin, fat bodies.

I'm thinking a lot about Blanche's self-flagellation toward the end and how it reframes the Scarlet section.

One element I wanna call out because it stands out to me,  how real and painful it is to see the skinny white girl, the only girl who deigns to hang out with Letty at school, shrug her shoulders when Letty tries to open up. How she says "Go to therapy" and wipes her hands of the situation. Ostensibly, they're both bullied loners, but Friend is reproducing the same hierarchies with Scarlet that have them quarantined them from the rest of their classmates. It reinforces how many other invisible layers of social support (mostly offscreen) have failed by siloing these two off via any number of mundane violences.

I loved the art, I enjoyed the sound.

To writing craft: you have a very gentle and direct style that's both easy to read and full of emotion, especially during exposition. On the other hand your dialog and mental narration was less consistent in my opinion, especially in the second half when there were a handful of important moments where a character would say something that felt kind of canned to me and pulled me out of the story. I think another editing pass through the Blanche section could make the VN go absolutely haywire.

Thanks so much for making this game. I really enjoyed it.

I'm glad that it was able to connect! I hope you have a good rest of your day.

this fucking rips

thanks so much for playing!

thank you for reading it, and for everything. the jam has been an energizing experience, though at this point I don't really know what, if anything, that it can accomplish politically/organizationally. hoping that more people get out and get connected enough to really start causing trouble.

thank you for playing. love you, be well.

this was heart-moulding. i feel like i've been left in the middle of a busy street holding a stranger's baby. im lucky to live in a world where you made this and i read it.

thanks for checking it out, glad you got something out of it. it's nice to hear that the intro hit hard. that part was supposed to be pretty angry, so good to hear it did the thing, hopefully didn't put you off the rest of the game too much.

hang in there.

thank you for playing. be good to yourself. self-soothe, stabilize, and when you're ready: talk about these feelings with loved ones sooner rather than later, even if you don't have all the words.

fun art, great use of sound, witty concept. the squish climax and the himejoshi body horror was very fun.

thanks for taking a look, i'm glad you unenjoyed.

theres some really evocative stuff happening here.

i like how the prose drifts from diaries at summer camp to religious psychosis, i like the main character hearkening to uriah, while apparently torturing & confining the autistic baddie - and the descriptions of that we get are pretty slick. i like the background image, the darkening of it over time, and the main menu image as well.

i wouldve liked to see more in terms of sound, color, text effects to make this pop on the multimedia level, and i wouldve liked to see this story talk about why these things are happening, who these people are, since at times i feel a little lost in trying to interpret it.

there's a certain romance to be had between oblivion and enduring it, although i don't feel much seduction comes through in this text.

this is very much a conversation between a persister and a pile of crushing forces: family, medicine, religion, etc. its tight, the metaphor works, the thesis is clear, it exists.

i do like the bitterness in the ending.

i wish a little bit more time was spent on presentation.

The color theory here is really excellent, with the peach tones setting the stage. This idea of two ends of a gradient, and the ways they overlap. The tension between the two characters. The semi-diptych poem. It adds a lot on top of this spiteful envious text.

I loved the silhouette tracings. I loved the placement of text on the screen, I loved how those two things interplayed, avoiding each other and becoming enmeshed with hostility.

There was a lot of artistic unity in this. So I was kind of disappointed that there wasn't much of a soundscape. Not a big takeaway, but notable for me.

that was killer. thanks so much for putting it together. fun lil meditation on loneliness, starting over, (re-)learning how to be a person - something I think a lot of us are doin these days. great job

wahoo!