I identify with this so much. I can get myself in an ugly echo chamber with this. What often works for me is to challenge myself to write something light and funny using a dark and evil prompt. Like writing a short comedic scene based on Yeats’s The Second Coming. It’s surprisingly effective, because it forces me to use the negative to find a positive.
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What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards the rug to hack up a hairball?
Er, no. How about:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The toddler outpaces the toddler-minder
Still no, too much focus on small creatures behaving anarchically. Last try:
…somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Checks its smartphone and despairs of finding the AirBnB
This is hard!
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But fun, amirite?
The slow thighs are absolutely RIPE with comedic gold. And anyone who has ever tended a baby has certainly been vexed to nightmare. Someone totally ought to make this game.
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I admit, I could not get the slow thighs to gel in a PG, forum appropriate way, but as you say they are right there.
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I beat the Resident Evil 4 remake! It’s awesome.
I think I have time to beat it again before the pre-submission panic mode replays begin
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OK, here’s my short comedic scene on The Second Coming.
THE WIDENING GYRE
Location: The sands of the desert.
Falconer: Where’s my falcon?
Man-Headed Lion: I don’t think he can hear you. What’s that weird thing over there?
Falconer: It’s a gyre, I think. It appears to be widening.
Man-Headed Lion: Dude, I think your falcon’s in there. See it turning and turning around in there?
Falconer: Shit. It’s falling apart. I don’t think the center of that thing’s gonna hold. FALCON! GET OUT OF THERE!
[Gyre squeezes falcon and it pops and splatters all over]
Man-Headed Lion: Oh, gross. It’s like a blood-dimmed tide of exploded falcon. It’s all over me.
Falconer [screams and wails]: Oh, me. The innocent days of playing with my falcon are all over.
Man-Headed Lion: Well, time you grew up, kid. I mean, have you SEEN the state of our politics? All the worst people are all fired up, and all the best people just stay home drunk. They don’t even try anymore.
Falconer: Maybe my falcon will come back. Maybe there’s a magic spell, like in an old book, that can reanimate him?
Man-Headed Lion [gazing blankly at Falconer]: Sigh. You’re pitiful. And why are my thighs so chapped? They’re rubbing together unpleasantly. I probably shouldn’t have eaten all those desert birds, but they were flying around all the time, looking indignant, and I didn’t like it.
[the lights go out]
Falconer: Why is the darkness dropping again? It’s not time. I can’t see anything very well.
Man-Headed Lion: Well, it’s time for the baby’s nap, and God help us if we try to get it to sleep while it’s light. That baby never sleeps and I’m so tired and vexed that I have nightmares. I can’t wait for the day it heads off on its own. Maybe to Bethlehem. Slouchy little brat.
Falconer: Maybe that’s where the magic book is!
The End.
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It’s been such a delightful volley between these characters! The character I’ve mainly been piloting is by no means a saint, so it’s extra fun pitting her against someone like Gideon. Makes all her redeeming traits stand out from the shadows of her flaws, like holding a film negative up to light.
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Being a little meowmeow who scours their emails first thing upon waking up has paid off twice this week for me: I caught an errant misbooking on the therapy clinic’s end (that would have otherwise cost me 153$ roughly in cancellation fees had I not immediately pounced on it) and caught an accidental (on their end) cancellation of a legally accommodated appointment I had for tomorrow (it got pushed to a morning timeslot on this Friday instead, otherwise I would have been absolutely up hell’s creek due to the convoluted nature of the student-side access booking portal.)
Yay for being a sharp eyed little meowmeow. And now… I will go make some coffee, eat my cold egg sandwich, and start on my other silly kitty tasks that aren’t overhead admin related.
EDIT: MEOWMEOWS GOT SURPRISED WITH A GIFTED KIBY BREAKFAST… A treatie…
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The universe saw it fit to grant me a week extension of my paper that was due this Friday, so…
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Every now and then, I like to scrummage around on the internet for articles about Twine, and more generally, hypertext. I’m always struck by how crazy it is that a lot of the canonical names are contemporaries. I used to follow some of these people on Twitter, and saw all of their silly little cat posts, for goodness sake! It’s kind of fitting, in a way, I suppose- with how Twine sought to make game development more accessible for a broader audience.
Anyways, this is the article of the day. It has some interesting things to say about agency within choice based narratives, and some examples of games that demonstrate it to good effect. It mentions Anthropy’s work, which is a name I’ve come to realize permeates quite a lot of literature on Twine, and some interesting games I’ve never seen linked before in articles. (An obligatory reference to Depression Quest also appears, befitting a seminal work.)
I especially liked the bit where it talks about how Twine had/has a lot in common with the zine scene: LGBT creatives exhibiting lesser seen narratives, focused on the grungy underbelly. I wonder what the overlap is with that sort of vibe with the Bitsy crowd, another tool I’ve seen (and used myself) to make similarly narrative driven, personal, emotional pieces with an emphasis on accessibility and ease of use.
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It was only made public in 2009 
Twine is a teenager 
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Nooooooooo, now you’re making me feel old. Oh, how the tables have turned! :3
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ahahahaha WORTH IT >:3
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A friend of mine is taking his kitty to the vet today- for a routine checkup and a vaccination, as he was a grungy little rough and rowdy street tom when first adopted. I asked if he would be getting a little treatie and some kissies afterwards for being such a brave little man, and my friend agreed enthusiastically- he’s getting a Churu and some salmon as a reward.
It makes me happy that he’s such a loving pet owner. He’s been infinitely patient with this scraggly little creature, and it’s been wonderful seeing the bond between the two of them blossom as his little meowmeow gets a little braver, day by day: and even snurgles up at bedtime when he thinks my friend is dead asleep, as he’s too shy to outright cuddle. He very recently made his first biscuits ever, and we were all thrilled.
So happy for such a little guy to know he’s so beloved. He was a standoffish, meanie bo beanie at first: but you can hardly hold it against him. That’s how he kept himself safe on the streets. And now he’s an old guy relaxing in his lovely fluffy cat bed, fed delicious treats and brushed until his fur shines, learning what its like to be loved and love, and to feel safe and secure.
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Still on the paper crawl. I’m always surprised when I run across a mention of the meowmeows on here!
“Crossovers with emerging markets could be facilitated by formations like the
Electronic Literature Organization or the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF),
which unites those interested in parser games (especially on the Inform platform), Twine
work, and other branching narrative systems. IFTF is not exclusively or primarily
academic and welcomes interest from industry.”
"‘However, would recognition by Short, Montfort, Andrew Plotkin, Aaron Reed, or some
other authority from the I.F. world make someone, in Cayley’s terms, a “prominent literary
practitioner?’”
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It’s uh, I don’t know what to call it. We’re under a weather advisory. It’s sleeting, and flurrying- slurrying? The cross directional winds are whipping snowflakes into a mid air lattice while falling every which way and down, and it’s cold and blustering open doors inside. It’s whipping down sideways. Thank goodness I got to stay home today…
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Found the chapter that this one references. I really like the ending…
Reconnecting with Twine made me feel a lot like McDaid’s Glass Man, a vagrant scuffling across time tracks. Didn’t we disappear somewhere in the nineties? Bones of old men, indeed.
Back in the heyday of hypertext, my generation consisted mainly of academics with an attitude, skulking in basement Macintosh labs—the labs were always in the basement—fondly dreaming about the end of print. That end came, sort of, and in an important way did not.
Meanwhile, there were other changes. The culture war about which I fabulated in Victory Garden erupted in harsh reality. The skin my cohort had in the game was nothing compared to what Quinn and others, including my coauthor, have had to risk in the endless aftermath of Gamergate. The older generation was out to change college composition, creative writing, and perhaps publishing, not the multibillion-dollar video game industry. What did we know? All commitment to the struggle, all respect to the youth.
So now here we are, friends and strangers, writers and aca-fans, all wound up in this project that threads through our lives in so many weird, queer, and astounding ways. As the oldest Twine writer in the world—because I was writing Twine before there was Twine, also because I am old—I will say this entanglement feels, in a way it has never felt before, really good. As Rettberg says, the play continues.
For all the anger and suffering and thickening darkness, something important is happening. We are all part of a significant unfolding of language, ideas, and human possibility—may it last. May the future of Twine be glorious and full of righteous trouble, and may we all live to see it. Never give up what’s in your heart.
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I find little odds and ends because of the open ended nature of some of the search terms that I use sometimes. I think Manon might find this kind of helpful? It’s a workshop for someone totally brand new to Twine, and trying to teach them how to use variables and such.
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