itch.io

in yesterdays many | the year burned by
but with cool robots | as constant companions
through hard days and happy | hero-lines pattered
bleak, yet a comfort | this blanket of verse
a well-worn quilt | a wonderwork strange
a treasure atheling-fit | in the trove of tales
so our thanks we must sing | like a thrush in the dew
to sicko or normie | may all songs find ears

cosmic warlord kin-bright is such a wonderful gift to the world and we're so glad you made it. it really does inspire us to keep writing making art, no matter how weird it is, and the twitch readings have been our comfort-listening to put on when we need a distraction from the world or are feeling overstimulated and want something familiar. it has had such a big impact on our life, and we have lost count of how many times we've read or listened to parts of it. our favorite book is, i think, "Family Resemblance", because we like the social sci-fi at play in it. our friends and partners are well used to us infodumping about cosmic warlord kin bright to them or quoting lines, but this poem is just one of my special interests at this point, i love it so much, its the kind of thing we wished for since we were a kid and it feels weird and cool that it's real and out there and so, so good. hoping we might eventually get a print copy of cwkb. but in the meantime, here's to another year of cool robot poetry. brimming with bright-thanks c::::

oh okay good to know !!thank u ^^

oh also i do intend to put more brainweird writing and magic stuff on my website, elfwine.neocities.org, (and also just other fun stuff, especially what i would like to do right now is take lots of pictures of my stuffed animal friend bluebell, in fact today i was going to put a little dare wright inspired photo-story about her doing laundry up there, but instead i was writing this to you x3 worth it imo)

but for now there's not alot there sadly. x.x this winter probably  tho!!

what a remarkable and wonderful comment to wake up to ^^ <3 a number of folks have told us our essay have meant something to them, but this comment, as people might say, "hit's different". i'm really glad it spoke to you, and gave you new and exciting ideas. i wish very much that i could offer a more coherent comment, but we're a little bit out of it as well, i suppose. 

thank you for the recommendation on "reclaiming your mind," though, and also, in terms of other essays from the jam i can recommend, i really enjoyed "[psycho].spiritual", which is about psychosis and spiritual experience and hypnosis and plurality. it had quite a profound effect on us. in terms of other essays about, as you say, "weird brain shit", we really love the writings of Devon Price, an autistic psychologist who's written a lot of really amazing essays and books about transness, ableism, neurodivergence, ageism, youth liberation, and other stuff, most of which i honestly have not evern read. in the theme of age and disability, i recommend abolish age. also, there's a book called "may tomorrow be awake" which is about autistic poetry, that had (and continues to have) a pretty big impact on me. it touches alot on non-normative 'art' and self-expression and even a bit on neurodivergent mysticism. i would *love* to find more stuff about ND mystic experience, really. a friend of ours who is kinda similar to us in being, Weird, wrote this piece about becoming. 

and i guess if you want to completely bite off more than you can possibly chew, "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is an extremely dense work of what the authors call "schizoanalysis", a deconstructive approach to turning psychology on its head that is largely "pro madness" in alot of ways. i don't wanna pretend like im some philosophy student who understands it perfectly. many parts of it, especially those responding to other philosophers, are kind of impenetrably difficult for me to read, i haven't even read most of it, i've jumped around a lot (which is something they actually recommend, because they reject the idea that the book is even a "book" but rather a rhizome, a nonhierarchical, interconnected structure where every point is joined to every other point). it is quite deliberately confusing, i think they once said that they want people to "bring something incomprehensible into the world". sometimes i strongly disagree with things in the book and yet other times i feel like they understand perfectly what it's like to really *see* the world the way i do. the whole language of rhizomes, territories, lines of flight becomings, refrains, bodies without organs, etc has certainly permeated our vocabulary, and even if we might not fully understand how they were using it all the time, i think they would probably approve of a weird neurodivergent burnout trans creature taking their ideas and running with them.

mad pride is also a pretty cool movement against saneism and towards the valuing of "brain weird" experiences as a beautiful thing.

also, i really love the music of queer freak-folk artist noel'le longhaul. we first found their music as a teen, it was the very first trans music we were exposed to, and it's had a huge impact on us, i can't fully articulate articulate how big a part of who we are it is. it feels very 'queer brainweird magic' to us. our favorite album of theirs is called the meadow.

like i said, i wish i knew more, and had more stuff to link. probably there's things rattling around in our head that we just can't remember right now.

all of us here in our little world wish the very best for you, and hope you keep learning, and growing, and molting, and changing, and trying out new ideas, and learning who you are, and that you find lots of safe communities full of supportive, safe, and dependable folks. <33 ^^

is there going to be another chance in the near future to order a reprint? i'm really really sad, because i got the email announcing there would be a reprint, and i signed up to the backerkit email list and was checking my email alot hoping for the announcement to come when it was time to preorder, but no such email ever arrived, and only came here today to find out that the preorders are already sold out, and i am just really sad cuz i was desperately hoping to get a print copy of this game. :c

i loved these essays. they are so insightful and wonderful. the one about brainwashing was especially interesting to chew on, and the third essay was a good read for someone who cycles through "i am cut from the cloth of gods" to "what am i gonna eat....." and back regularly

this is amazingly good!!!!! thank you for sharing it, it is such a wonderful & useful map of trance, usefully different than what we usually imagine, in a way that is exciting and fills us with racing thoughts and ideas!! the language in it was beautiful as well, so evocative and indeed almost a little bit hypnotic maybe, just a little. you are a really good writer!!!

<333333

thank you thank you thank you c: <333

this essay rang in us and *broke* something inside of us and we don't know if we will ever be the same again. it lit actual magic, actual magic that completely recontextualizes all preexisting encounters with magic, inside us. our worldview is broken apart into a billion pieces. as we read it, we noticed after a page or two, the way the text seemed to be mirrored, inviting us to a strange confusion about the normally linear flow of language. and we felt like we had picked up a tiny compact mirror, or a fragment of the most beautiful, full-color, realistic holographic plate of Everything, and could only twist and turn it, this way and that, to see just tiny little slices of the world, through this little shard of glass.

and then we began to see the bigger picture. oh. ... oh... . oh.

and it felt like a manyworld's shadow passed over us, we saw everything and realized that we were the cracks in between the everything looking at it all, we saw a cycle of dreams raining down from the end of all the worlds like a cosmic watercycle, and i began to understand things about myself, about ourselves, that we never even knew. or we knew but we didn't want to know. we didn't even know we we afraid and repressed until we stepped outside of it all and *i* stepped outside it all, and saw it, all of it, and now what i fear most afraid of is just going back to "normal", the hyphae of this particular rhizome binding me back in place and making me forget how to feel the magic again. i forgot who i was and where i came from and why i ended up in this world, for so long, because of a kind of ontological parasite that had nestled itself into our hyphae and i can't bear to go back to that parasite.

and most of all we were afraid of telling nobody, of letting this miraculous vision pass us by, of social pressure to continuity erasing it. so this all has ended in a group chat labeled "impromptu plurality recoming out party" & all our friends in this little slice of reality being very sweet and supportive to us even though we kind of sound a little unhinged. thank you so much for writing this. thank you.

~ ᚛ᚐ᚜ esh (i think. or something, the idea of names feels almost a little hubristic now)

thank u for such a nice comment c: we r really happy with the positive feedback that a few folks have given us now about this essay; we weren't expecting it to ring with ppl as much as it has. the "magic circle" as an idea, when we learned about it, was really exciting and made things make sense in all time-ways c:

YAY!!!!! wishing u the best with ur health stuff, and looking forward to the poem ^^

(A long-overdue review from a fan and former cohost user, who has followed the poem since books IX and X)

There is *nothing* like Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.  It changed how I see poetry. It gave me an out to read when I was having a really bad depressive episode. It is one of my favorite things, it's an autismic special interest that I'm always eagerly working into conversations. I have read most of the poem several times over. There are parts of it I can quote from memory.

We used to think we didn't like "high style", it felt like a walled garden we were not allowed into. We never saw ourselves, or the things that excite us, depicted in it.  But this poem has toxic yuri! It has insects! It has noticing the speed of sound! It has ring-ships and radios AI's and aquariums and dragons and hyperspace and even (I fear to say it but I must) cool world-building! :D And it would not have captured our attention nearly as much if all of this were not written in the flowery, uncringing voice of a homeric epic. High Style is SO BACK and you can write anything you can dream of in it.

The poetry is *good*! It uses forms almost like leitmotifs in a movie, which is *really* effective, especially for the death-poems. It introduced me to many wonderful obscure words. It makes me want to go write my own fantastical poetry. I'm really glad it's written in strictly-followed 5-beat lines (and alliterative verse!) rather than free verse. There is a wonderful feeling to getting immersed in a long narrative poem; after a while, you entrain to the ever-present rhythm and it becomes a magical, even hypnotic experience. Books IX and X sent us *nonverbal*. In a very very good way.

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright also secretly is an accessible bridge to pre-modern poetry. It uses many common poetic forms, and regularly references and shares themes/motifs with older texts,  which makes going and reading something like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Iliad even more exciting, because you'll see little glimmers of this poem in them. This poem got me to take an interest in a bunch of *other* poetry we would have NEVER even known about, let alone read, otherwise. We are over here trying to learn to read Middle English with all its yoȝs and þorns because of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.

It's also kinda refreshing to see good fiction that expects you to have a brain and basic critical reading skills and to understand that this story is (in-world) *propaganda.* It's a good ol' fashioned I-Can-Fix-Her-Says-Girl-Who-Is-Worse type story and it's one of my go-to comfort readings when I need something that makes me feel like, "well, at least *that* isn't my life".

If you are on this itch page, eyeing up this poem, I am begging you, *please* read (or listen to!) Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.  This poem is one of the most creative, exciting, unique pieces of sci-fi we've ever read. I just love this poem so much.

all right, it took an extra evening for my (more-tech-knowing) gf to do some audio magic to give it nicer metadata and make the files smaller, but I finally got it uploaded, here it is: https://neonpixii.itch.io/cwkb-mp3. If you need me to change any of the wording on that page, let me know. 

And if you do ever feel the desire in the future to instead host these files directly on your own itch page, please feel free to just do so (I do feel kinda awkward/sheepish hosting something I didn't make under my own itch username).

for my own ease of listening on a ipod with limited storage space and without internet, (and also because i'm a platform-pessimist) i downloaded the vods, pulled out the audio, and split them up into individual books (with almost no further editing aside from making them louder, adding media player metadata, cutting the very largest chunks of dead air, and iirc one moment of chat moderation being removed). 

would it be okay if i linked to a zip file of them here in a comment, for anyone else who'd prefer or need an offline version? (or, i guess alternatively, i could send them to you, and you could host them on your itch as an "interrim audiobook", if you wanted that, because to be honest the easiest way i as a nontechnical person can imagine hosting so many megabytes of audio anyways is via a for-free-only, extremely-unofficial, go-support-the-original-author itch page)

thank you!!

you basically have convergently evolved the brainworm i had while reading the tain, where we were daydreaming a fergus mac roich or cu chulainn like character, one that is so bombastic and hedonistic and unrepentantly horny and problematic, as a Big Dick Energy trans girl, except u actually went and wrote it instead of just daydreaming about it like me and now *i* get to enjoy my brainworm come to life, and it is the most  irish mythology thing i have read in a while besides actual irish mythology

(we feel like alot of stuff that cites irish myth as an inspiration frequently feels like it bears very little resemblance to actual irish myth, which in our experience reading what we have,  irish myth kinda feels less like "celtic earth goddess matriarchy mysterious fae in lush forests" of pop culture and more like a long series of extremely irreverent yet oddly compelling Dudes Rock slapstick moments, underlaid by a deep attention to geography and moments of genuine, honest, intense feeling).  the image of a gleaming sunbright army of motorcycles across the martian landscape just slots in so well with my mental model of the feeling of the world of the tain, if it were transported to the distant future.  the cyborgs, the hounds, they have the same kind of characteristic grotequeness that cu chulainn has.

i love the way this story displays the same layered nature of stuff like the tain, different "strata" of stories.  the translator's notes are great, and also the usage of little stock phrasings common in medieval irish manuscripts like ni anse/"not difficult".  i hope we get to see some songs/poems and especially some rosc-like passages in future chapters, that stuff was so compelling to me in the Tain, even tho i know major aspects of it were lost in translation

(excuse my lack of diacritics, my laptop cant type them)

oh my stars someone, went and wrote something that somehow feels even more *laser targeted* at me and my interests than even Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.

i've read The Táin (primarily the Carson translation, with some dabbling in the Kinsella translation) and enjoyed it alot, and I would like to know, how would you recommend reading the rest of the ulster cycle?

will you save an audio recordings of the complete reading (or twitch vods or whatever)? i know with tea breaks, chat interactions, and inevitable slipups it would hardly be an audiobook-quality thing but it would be nice to have at least some sort of audio version of CWKB available for folks who'd prefer to hear the poem than read it eyeballsly

this is one of the coolest/most out-there ideas for a BoB game i've ever seen, and it makes me wish i had friends interested in shape-note singing that i could play it with

will there ever be a print edition of this game? (maybe bundled with going rogue?)

THANK YOU OMG

will you ever consider making a epub version of this story? (or porting it to ao3 or somewhere else that supports downloading as epubs?)

epub is a matter of accessibility for me. pdfs are very difficult for me to read. i really want to read this story but i basically can't as a pdf :c

this is so wonderful, we especially are excited to try it out for "solo" play. 

btw, would you ever consider making a verison with a easier-to-read font?  we find the super ornate font hard to understand.  either way, thanks for making this! it's lovely.

I really appreciate this game.  I played a relatively short game, with only two confidants, and got a "good" ending with nobody leaving me when they found out my changeling nature.   I wasnt expecting myself to be so strongly affected by it, emotionally, and yet, I was STRONGLY affected.  Probably because I put my character thru situations similar to what I experienced growing up, oops.

Its an emotionally intense game, and its important to be gentle with yourself if you play it and not bite off more than you could chew.

I'm just always happy to see autistic art, so I bought this game twice, once on its own and once in the fundraiser unsale bundle.  Thank you for making this game <3.

Here is our character sheet.  Our apologies for our messy handwriting and unorthodox switching of writing directions.

edit: Oh, the itch comments section formatting seems to elongate images.  Thats frusturating. It seems like if you open the image in a new tab tho, it displays normally.

this is so so so so so so so so so so so so good like i cant overstate how good and nice this is

idk im not good with words but thank you so very very much this art feels good to look at i love all the nice colors and cute textures and stuff 

i hope you make more stuff like this because i would love to buy more stuff like this! 

one of my favorite things was seeing nat & lexie's cameo on the beach i love nat he's one of my favorite characters of yours it would be cool if you made another comic featuring those two sometime

but yeah like words are hard and this art is good and thank you for making it its really great