Wow, there’s so much good stuff here. Thanks for all the work you put into this.
I downloaded the whole archive at the beginning of the comp, and it’s interesting seeing just how many of these have been updated since then.
Aw…Sam didn’t talk about this either, for the same reasons. And I’ve been hoping someone would, because it didn’t work for me at all, and I’ve been wondering if that was just my brain being weird.
The text obscures the image to the point where I couldn’t tell what it was: the crease in the bottom left read to me like the legs and rear end of someone bending over, so along with the clear woman’s face at the top I thought it was some sort of collage, and I couldn’t decipher the brown blob to the middle right at all (a barrel or something?). After reading this I went through the files and found the version without the text, but it wasn’t until seeing that that I realized it was just a painting of a woman holding a rose, and the white blob was her shoulder and the brown blob her hand.
And the blurb was sparse to the point of supporting totally misleading impressions: to me, coupled with Horror and Content Warnings, “My mother made a deal” says “she threw me to the wolves”, not “she used her influence to get me a job”, and similarly, “So here I am, working the night shift, alone with her work” has my mind going “she creates Frankenstein monsters and I’m trying to survive them until morning” or something.
Hard Puzzle 4: the “recommendations” are new, and are actually quotes from the thread here on intfiction. That’s amusing, though it’s always still slightly disconcerting to me to find someone has quoted something you said like that. Not bad, just…“Wait, what? Really?”
Now that is a great sentence. Also very on-point. Love it.