Cyclic Fruition Number One
by D E Haynes
This fell in a middle ground where it didn’t really grab me, and I wished it had leaned more into something.
I tend to think the Winograd/Flores inspired conversation state diagram that it’s built around is overly-complicated and hard to follow, and the slight surrealism (?) obfuscates it even further. But then the weirdness felt like it was just for the sake of weirdness rather than having much purpose or much to say, so that wasn’t very satisfying either. And the looping around felt like it was just filling out parts of the diagram, rather than an experiment in evoking some sort of… something through loopy Twine poetry.
It felt just a little underbaked in ways that triggered my “the emperor has no clothes” response pretty hard. Like the passage where the dialogue was a stanza from each of our ABC characters, and the first and third were reasonable approximations of what, iambic tetrameter? And the second’s meter seemed to be designed to be as awkward as possible to read aloud. That had to be an intentional bit, right? But I don’t know why it’s interesting or particularly funny.
Dunno. It wasn’t bad; it was fun to loop through several times. But it didn’t feel meaningful enough for me to think it was worth the unnecessarily confusing presentation of a sci-fi (?) vignette that didn’t really go anywhere.