itch.io

I love the idea of revivifying an obscure poem, and the choice here is really great. In no small part to the name of the author, Lillie Lilberne, which is  somehow deeply affecting for inexplicable reasons!

Enigmatic and wonderfully interwoven

Thank you I just saw your zine piece! I can’t wait to dig into your back catalogue. Greetings from the void zone !

We ALL had fun

This is an incredible piece of work. Really bursting at the seams with precious local lore, brilliant edu-gameplay, gorgeous photography, and local charm. There’s just so much to dig into here. Not to mention some genuinely ridiculous moments that made me burst out laughing. As a big fan of a few “local history” bloggers in my part of the world, I really enjoy digging into this stuff, but have never quite seen it done this way before. There’s something really fun and almost Borgesian about the “fake” guidebook that is basically substantively all actually there embedded within the game. 

Maybe the closest was way back when I reviewed the PC-88 game Mirrors for ChoiceBeat, I remember the very strange “European tour” edutainment that made up a bulk of the middle segment of the game, where you toured different cities and learned about local castles in heavy detail.  

I know walking around my city I have a few local favourite blogs and guidebooks I keep handy. But there is always the inevitable transition from breezy blog post to published book that happens with some of these initiatives. The books get “tighter”, more serious, authoritative, sterner. Anecdotes are cropped and only verified details make the cut. As a result a lot of the personality and gabby charm is lost. Whereas this format is genius because if anything it encourages you to exaggerate and have MORE fun with it.

I think it’s incredible that people exploring Archer ave will have this available in a handy HTML format that works gorgeously on mobile. This is something really special that can simultaneously serve as a reference book, a game to play, and the equivalent of taking a walking tour with the local kook! 

I could also see this being incredibly fun to make, traveling up and down, shooting photographs, remembering and digressing. A real delight and an inspiration for future psychographical deep dives within a CYOA frame!

“Have you seen the trailer for GRAND THEFT OF THE AUTOMATONS?”

“It’s going to make GRAND THEFT OF THE MARIONETTES look like a petty larceny.”

“I can’t believe the level of hype personally. I’m not normally one for contingent void attractions but holy hell, the nonrendering on those clear plastic walls!?”

“I am impressed by how utterly bleak the collage is! It is like Max Ernst’s Hundred Headless Woman but with like, 3 more heads missing.”

“I don’t care what anyone says. That cube is so hot.”

*

8 CURSES SECRET MENU

We all love 8 Curses to Bestow Upon Your Enemies (8C2BUYE) but did you know there is a secret menu that is not listed but that the universe HAS to do if you ask? Here’s what to say:

HYGIENER to combine the tastebuds from curse 5 with the toilet seat in curse 1

VANILLA BLESSING to combine the success from curse 4 with the happy life of curse 8

HIT SINGKLE to combine the putrid voice from curse 1 with the “again and again and again” from curse 8

FETISHISTIC INFIDELITY to combine the jealousy from curse 4 with the feet from curse 3

*

And what the hell is RC up to this month?

Tries out a transit system

Discovers a new dog breed

Does some “art in the park”

Attends a personal growth seminar on dreams

And more wholesome-adjacent hallucination

He really is living his best life out there! I am starting to wonder if Romonde is one of those SECERET MILLENNIALS?

*

I think the final page on the “extract” is perhaps a letter of provenance for a Hollywood collectible. A prop from a missing scene of the Science Fiction film “Supersize Me” that was removed in the final cut for fear of censors… It involves the R&D portion of the restaurant chain in question and the biohacking required to achieve certain ends promised on specific 2 Can Dine for 9.99 coupons. It is probably signed somewhere so I’d say it’s a safe bet for any collector of ALTERNATIVE NUTRIENT DEVICES and iconic corporate branding alike.

Sub-Zero vs Scorpion Coded

Purple: the Klub is the ultimate club

Blue: I also klub this tremendous hypnotic club

Green: !!! I love another such Dracula object!

Red: death to nondracula no clubs 

Well said. Maybe we ourselves are also just things and not Things.

I love the experiments and the publication of them as experiments and the eroticization of all of the above 

Thank you!! so glad you found your way in!

Marvelous, open-ended, exploratory, fruitful.

And the design just oozes an uncanny textbook credibility. Sleek!

Thank you for chewing!!! a lot of it is still obscure to me too, but the process of putting it together was satisfying 

Damn… YOU’RE RIGHT

Thank you!! Yes, and why not also keep one in your garage too, for good measure?

Say thanks a buncb wiz! Maybe the real collectibles were the friends we made along the way?

Excellent mechanism, wonderful atmosphere!

This is so awesome!

Cryptic and evocative! Gorgeously designed, clever, quietly threatening. I really enjoy how much blank space is left for the imagination to fill in. The best kind of puzzle, where the result at the end is even more of an enigma. Really a condensed wonder, and in no small part due to its restrained and fragmentary character. So the fact that there is "not much to it" is actually a major aspect that really contributes to the effect!

It reminded somehow of the film The Invention of Morel which also had this strange artefacts and oddball quietude in a beautiful island setting. Something special here!

Your "method" makes a lot of sense. I often think about how the old school cartoonists would work directly in storyboards or in the strip without any preconceived script. It allows you to really work in the medium and allow it to surprise you (and as a consequence, US!)

This thing is a masterpiece. Total inspiration generator. The attitude seeped into the guts like too much neon energy drink turned over in your backpack. It’s such a perfect blend of quiz, interactive fiction, CYOA, and a goddamn timecapsule of densely packed INFOTAINMENT for all the senses. It’s like an interactive multimedia lookbook that captures the fleeting essence of an entire timebound subculture. Infinity in a wipeout reel. Y2Kologists a century from now are going to be eating good spiralling endless theses on this beast.

Also an absolute pitch perfect alignment of medium, form, and content aka DECKER MAXXED OUT.

Thank you! I like your word “memorytelling” !

The informal theme for this issue seems to be “weirdly plausible.” The letter of the day seems to be Q. More below. The safety tip seems to involve care around RITUALS, PACTS, and BOARDROOM ETIQUETTE.

/

The Quantumphysifascists seem like some evil offshoot of the ‘Pataphysicists. Like maybe some kind of CCRU adjacent deep evil nightmare society, The text is highly cryptic and clearly meant for ceremonial purposes. I could see it operating a little like Bataille’s acéphale group, actually quite awkward and hard to get going, maybe a bit of afterwork grumbling and ritual machineplay in the woods amongst a few suppressed salarymen? That combined with a deranged sort of ponzi scheme / crypto scam, a hyperstition death/insolvency delay tactic combined with Timeshare immortality swindles.

/

Every epic poem requires the hero to descend to the underworld at some point. Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, and now ROMONDE finds himself chased like a suicidal fly into the crunching gears of Percivil’s Haunted House. And much like the epic tradition we get there a mixture of torture, regret and convoluted bureaucracy (here in the form of a BOARD). There’s something extraordinary about a dark ride that kind of spends most of its time circumnavigating a deranged board meeting. Something almost Ligotti-like. It also falls into a kind of Revelations-Apocalypse Sing-Song which is just irresistible!

/

I am a Victim of Slime and I called 75463 and I spoke to SlimeStoppers and I am leaving this halfstar review so that other people do not rely on them, it’s a SCAM people I am actually pretty sure the SLIME increased after the call, my entire basement is nothing but slime, they supposedly sent a rep for a quote and he never came back, and now I just want to perform obscene acts in full view.

/

There’s something so incredibly plausible about the Cybermonde story! Actually more than plausible, I am actually thinking of a few real examples of this as a potentially real Canadian tax-shelter film. It’s like The Brain meets Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter meets Videodrome meets some softcore porn rag out of Cinépix meets a Quebecois Satanic Panic exploitation thing like The Pyx . It’s giving me an inverted Mandela effect right now, like didn’t I actually see it and review it already? I could see the crew attempting to follow the infamous tax-shelter rules, failing completely, and then reverting into some occultic bad news like that is EXACTLY how it would have happened. 

TLDR Each subsequent issue of FU feels like it’s getting closer and closer to my room and one day it’s just gonna get me while asleep.

you’ve stolen a climax from your future self!

I love the idea of using decker to recreate old forgotten artefacts and paradigms. This rules!

HOLY BLEEP IT WORKS

Thank you ahmwma! may your canoptic jars be overflowing with the choicest cuts!

Thank you glad it resonated with you too! I agree it’s not the same thing as nostalgia, more uncanny, and above all, obsessive!

Full of stuff and void, signifying etc.

Immanent! The philosopher’s watersport. Fantastic and intense!

And the cycle begins anew!

Amazing! This is frighteningly addictive and will be super useful. And greatlyappreciate the Random button!

Thank you that is exactly what I was hoping to hit!!!

Hopefully disaster will take mercy on you and bless you with smithereens!

You can skip them, but that doesn’t mean they will skip you!

at first i didn't understand but my street also flood last week

This goes so hard, and it works with a touchscreen!

That's true you were ahead of the trend! 

This is hilarious. When I was a stupid kid, my friends and I were so desperate to "smoke" that we tried smoking pine needles wrapped in telephone book paper. Later some of them even picked butts off the street. It was very silly.

Also is the unofficial decker fanatasy camp theme "smoking is cool"