itch.io

I just leave the game running on the COSTCO level because I love the BGM so much

Thank you! I can’t help but think we’ve all met a few already…

We must ask again to what exogenous potent the pseudofigure of Shem Shelley has access, such that it can pull so many multifarious nightmares together in a single feuilleton? This issue has an astounding opener, a classic bit of sequential romance, slathered in bitrot and oozing “just desserts”. What a fable for our times! Shem is a fan of coloured entities and their foibles (see Tux and Fanny) and this little graphical substance adventure falls into the same disquieting mode, covering themes of romance, nutrition, and escape. We hope to see more!

Meanwhile Romonde does anything but keep us grounded with a meta-nauto-physical adventure aboard the DICTATOR SHIP. Overall a very VERNEAN sequence, complete with Professorial authority and canine dispositions. Magnificent.

The track promoted by VIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN might just be the final tour of Syd Barrett reincarnated as a trash compactor with a NES going through it. Strangely listenable, enjoyable even, this digestive adventure. FLAMES IN THE MORGUE is a dark way to end a dark issue, evoking equal parts folk horror in the page design with a micro-apocalyptic SF paragrapheme. KEEP AWAY!

that’s the “good” ending

right!??

Thank you! Yea as soon as I started to think up actual mechanics I got bored so decided to cheat and let the ambiguity speak for itself

As for p11 error that was unintentional but now that you've canonized it I am leaving it in!!

I heard there's an "infinite pants eggs" code

I have also found this seems to happen on view with the dialogizer. I will be interested to see if there is a way around it! The post you linked to seems to suggest to do it any other way than on view, like incorporating it into the “on click do” of the previous card instead…

OH NO… Came for the concept, STAYED for the execution. What a perfect capsule-nightmare! 

"THE ZINE THAT READS YOU" brilliant

Honestly felt like I was being drained by some unseen presence and that the words were being pulled from my own guts. 12th-person-omniscient-organelle

Well I for one am glad to finally have the story told “straight”. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all the same, but unhappy families are all to a certain degree infused with a PINK hatred. I can attribute any sense of psychic balance I have left (dubious) to the extensive holdings of the Alba Heddi libraries, which contain some marvellous banned comics. And now back to monkeysleep!

Romonde’s SOUS-REALISM deserves a word. In particular, the long avian twitch list, which speaks to the heart of any incidentalist. This should be printed out in the freely provided “SHEM’S CRYPT” font and tacked over the windows in your home, such that you can easily misidentify any flutterings with ease. I can cite one of the finest lines of the poem this issue, “WHEN WILL THEY LEARN” as a byword for life. 

 As for the Pizzaaaaaarrgghhh! review, it tempted me to try this strange game that only seems to exist in the mind. I found the graft mechanic a little clunkier than specified in the review, but the Smellovision™ was spot on. I wish more reviews would CRUSH the page with a single exclamation and leave only a small bottom corner for divagations, marginalia, opinion. After all, SHOUTING is the primal thing.

Is it just me or does Decker now seem to prompt you way more frequently with "The current deck has unsaved changes" warning? Even after you have already saved and the "save" menu item is greyed out... 

Amazing I am going to play your game! 

These are all from my real VHS collection, from some of the most degraded tapes I have. All the screens are just captures of the degraded tapes + that particular VCR

Thank you comrade in static! That sounds amazing 

The Procrsatinating Barbarian

I love the idea of a brutalist shrine, like somehow some kind of devolved ritual modernist cult.  

SHEM SHELLEY BACKS US INTO A CORNER AGAIN, DEMANDS NEURONS

The Black Matter Brain succinctly picks up where Shem’s nominal relation Mary Shelley left off. The root of science fiction has ever been knitting body parts together, but the specialist nature of today’s operation (only blackened brain matter) leads to a rather hyperfocused and ultra-efficient nova-spitting machine. Hence the 7 possible futures in lieu of the normal 1. It’s interesting how solipsistic the monster brain is, telling many brain-based tales, projecting itself onto everything, not unlike the original Wretch… BRAINS AND THEIR MALFUNCTIONS EVERYWHERE.

Special shout out to the German-heavy Possible Future #5, the most aesthetically satisfying of the lot. I’d like to hear more in the future about the adventures of the Impossibly Miniscule Organ.

This issue also makes HEAVY use of sigils. Each future is granted its own abstract logo, somewhat muted and not far-off from a bland 90s telecom venture.

Even Romonde’s normally detached ravings seem to be participating in cerebellum fever with the invocation of certain “Brain Juncture Vultures…” He also invokes certain spiritualized “Rough Sleepers” which strike me as metaphysical companions to the freakily invoked “Watchers” of the Book of Enoch. Which explains the coin-operated Samaritan Engine nicely.

LOVE-IS-LAND, even at sea.

The issue ends with a rather cryptic observational logorrhoea, something quotidian slipping off as it were, a kind of skin shedding, it definitely does not make sense but does not make no sense. The key is no doubt to be found in one of the massive green covered volumes of perpetually untouched Swedenborgeana available in the corner of every used bookshop on earth. That page and word wherein the insect lay crushed, is the answer.

Abstract tragicomic enterprise, very para-pleasant!!!

OH HELL YES

all my asemic noise trespassing fantasies come true (so this is what happens when you go THERE)

A cold fragmented psychodrama about 21st century politico-pathology. A kind of blueprint study for stochastic violence. Uses a montage cut technique (suited to Videotome!) to great effect, jumping from datum to datum, "building the case" for us to consider. The result is a kind of alienation effect followed by some delayed-reaction emotional whiplash. Harrowing and stylish.

This was great! Immaculate fractures! 

These are great thank you!

Thank you so glad you appreciated the categories, that was the funnest part. Tried to mimic some of the contingent weirdness of 90s clipart CD folders

This is extremely handy, class curriculum at NOISE U

Thank you!!

IN STATIC WE TRUST

Thank you for tasting!

It gets in your teeth!

Me I polish onions for grocery photoshoots

The extraction of a politico-lyrical nightmare from biography by means of an abstracted set of noisy dental tools. Exactly what we need and how it needs to be said

This is what all romance looks like from the perspective of the FUNHOLE (just read Koja's The Cipher so it's on the brain)

I'd be honoured! "from MindApe's DEGRADED! image pack" or whatever makes sense for you really.

thank you so much and BON APPETIT!

Basking in the ur-stasis! Benjamin's Angel of History is glitching out

J'ai trouvé l'oeil. Je ne reviens pas.
glitchking 4ever!

The weirdo filmmaker Guy Maddin said the best way to narrate dreams is to report them like a newspaper headline. I feel like this expands on that formula and takes it to the next level by actually simulating the experience of what it is like to read in a dream.

Gorgeous interplay between cormorant geometries, liquids, and good old fashioned PAIN. Really great mix of different elements, I think I detected some Decker DNA in there as well for the chat sequences. Sumptuous decadence, could make for an astonishing print artefact too.

I've definitely spent hours looking at Hieronymous Bosch demons saying "these guys know what's up"

Thank you so much!

(Maybe next time it will be “The Cubist Barbarian Goes to Bed”)

Some Enzymes to Pre-Digest With:

In August the wasps go out hunting for sustenance and the bugs on your leg become especially noticeable. Yesterday I got bit by something, and today, From Utopia…

The parallels between the necessary material (unskippable) stages of the alchemical process and the process of carcinisation are wisely indexed against one another for future analysis. It is known that the crab-shape has evolved many times, and could be the true foundation of the “stone” of which so much is frequently whispered. “The author fell on hard times”, which breeds a search for “hard things”, does it not? The great potential of this “street grown cancer” can be observed in Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible where the metal crabs have carcinized an entire planet. It’s a beautiful sight. I could also see the Street Cancer tale making the excellent basis for a screenplay, a plausible, realistic Rom-Com in the vein of Cronenberg’s The Fly. 

The Cubist Barbarian’s war warble is appropriately and tastefully distorted, and perfectly acceptable to Krom, the most formally cubist of all the Hyperborean “entities”. It would be interesting if some barbarian culture in the grimdark dying one day fully associates with barbanoise as their mobile culture.

Romonde Contreras reminds us likewise of the importance of “seacide” culture, that specific sand body soggy town sort of affair, where the saucy postcard meets the madness of the circus clown. In the manga Nekojiru Udon, the dream clown convinces the cat that since she has seen her own doppelganger in a dream, she can now practice the art of disappearing by squatting perfectly still. "Seacide" is a solution.

And finally in the “Beehive” we have a cryptic and condensed symbolist science fiction microfact. A story of ambiguous morality, remote cruelties and an insectoid catharsis of a sort or some kind of justice served. It moves ominously enough into a Blakean design frag, THE FIRES OF ORC.

Overall, a satisfactorily arthropod-heavy issue. 

(As an aside, I find it quite funny and possibly even satirical that such an extremophile publication as FU is tagged as “magical realism”, which I mostly associate with light coffeeshop non-committal and whimsical fantasy, the “oh something quirky happened gently in the timeline and now I am reflecting on the oddness of things” kind of story and not so much the total assault on the ideo-sensorium, the grey-matter inversion procedure that comes with a typical FU monthly pain-bag. Maybe it is developing its own subgenre of “realist magical extremism”...)

Thank you!! Goes well with “lumps” (one, two, several)…