P.S.: would *love* a follow-up piece on this about Homestuck, which had (and still has!) a bafflingly large fandom that was (from my experience) mostly uninterested in the formal experimentation and very, very concerned with which teenager was kissing which other teenager.
I was thinking about writing a piece about its predecessor Problem Sleuth for my newsletter, so Hussie has been on the brain lately. It's, perversely, much easier to read Problem Sleuth 17 years after its conclusion than its followup because it's MERELY gifs and text (and also because the noir it's spoofing is perversely more familiar to a modern audience than the specifics of using AIM in 2005 that was so central to Homestuck).
To be clear this isn't a dedicated Homestuck post (more of a survey of web fiction in general), but I will be spending some time talking about Homestuck in specific and also the Homestuck Discord!
I really loved this piece, as I too enjoyed 17776 and wish we had more weird multimedia pieces like it. Although it's not too hard to see *why* this sort of thing is so rare -- sorry to be all "it's the phones, stupid," but... it is in fact the phones, which just don't have the screen space to pull off this sort of thing.
What happens when you can't tell whether the media you're interacting with is real or fiction? This is the basis of the childhood ghost story, and that ambiguity is a powerful form of storytelling in all sorts of media.
- LonelyGirl15, which was a fake blog started by an actress which turned out to be a low-budget internet show. It was early enough in the internet that people thought it was real.
- the Blair Witch Project, which blurred the lines between reality and fiction with the "found footage" aesthetic
- House of Leaves, which is the only horror novel I ever read, but affected me deeply at the time. Extensive use of footnotes, typography, and manipulation of the physical presentation of the page create a sense of madness.
- The "backrooms" as a "liminal space," or the slenderman all utilize a low-fi minimalism to invoke horror.
- For video games, I would recommend Mateusz Skutnik and the "Submachine" series as an example of how these horrifying (or intriguing) liminal spaces can be created with very low tech and graphical simplicity.
How will AI affect this form of media? Will we all assume that everything scary is fake? Or will it be easier to generate frightening hoaxes? Or maybe both?
Yeah, I do think AI has a lot of potential when it comes to creating more immersive literary environments. One tactic that felt a bit before its time is the book S. (J. J. Abrams / Doug Dorst), which has a similar setup as House of Leaves but it also tries to start this ARG at the end of the text. The ARG component had fizzled long before I reached the end (this book was not all that popular), but I'm curious how it would have gone if there was some LLM at the backend that could continue to produce lore / output.
There is something terrifying about just talking to LLMs normally though. Usually it's chill, but sometimes I get the same weird feeling that I get sometimes when I'm deep in a TikTok doomscroll— the feeling that you're staring down into the abyss of the collective unconscious, and it's staring right back at you. It's pretty hard to describe to someone that hasn't experienced it, I think.
Slow cancellation of the future 🎯
P.S.: would *love* a follow-up piece on this about Homestuck, which had (and still has!) a bafflingly large fandom that was (from my experience) mostly uninterested in the formal experimentation and very, very concerned with which teenager was kissing which other teenager.
This is (sort of) coming next week actually!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!
I was thinking about writing a piece about its predecessor Problem Sleuth for my newsletter, so Hussie has been on the brain lately. It's, perversely, much easier to read Problem Sleuth 17 years after its conclusion than its followup because it's MERELY gifs and text (and also because the noir it's spoofing is perversely more familiar to a modern audience than the specifics of using AIM in 2005 that was so central to Homestuck).
To be clear this isn't a dedicated Homestuck post (more of a survey of web fiction in general), but I will be spending some time talking about Homestuck in specific and also the Homestuck Discord!
I know what a Homestuck is and I know what a Discord is, but I have no idea what these two words mean together. Should be educational!
I really loved this piece, as I too enjoyed 17776 and wish we had more weird multimedia pieces like it. Although it's not too hard to see *why* this sort of thing is so rare -- sorry to be all "it's the phones, stupid," but... it is in fact the phones, which just don't have the screen space to pull off this sort of thing.
What happens when you can't tell whether the media you're interacting with is real or fiction? This is the basis of the childhood ghost story, and that ambiguity is a powerful form of storytelling in all sorts of media.
- LonelyGirl15, which was a fake blog started by an actress which turned out to be a low-budget internet show. It was early enough in the internet that people thought it was real.
- the Blair Witch Project, which blurred the lines between reality and fiction with the "found footage" aesthetic
- House of Leaves, which is the only horror novel I ever read, but affected me deeply at the time. Extensive use of footnotes, typography, and manipulation of the physical presentation of the page create a sense of madness.
- The "backrooms" as a "liminal space," or the slenderman all utilize a low-fi minimalism to invoke horror.
- For video games, I would recommend Mateusz Skutnik and the "Submachine" series as an example of how these horrifying (or intriguing) liminal spaces can be created with very low tech and graphical simplicity.
How will AI affect this form of media? Will we all assume that everything scary is fake? Or will it be easier to generate frightening hoaxes? Or maybe both?
Yeah, I do think AI has a lot of potential when it comes to creating more immersive literary environments. One tactic that felt a bit before its time is the book S. (J. J. Abrams / Doug Dorst), which has a similar setup as House of Leaves but it also tries to start this ARG at the end of the text. The ARG component had fizzled long before I reached the end (this book was not all that popular), but I'm curious how it would have gone if there was some LLM at the backend that could continue to produce lore / output.
There is something terrifying about just talking to LLMs normally though. Usually it's chill, but sometimes I get the same weird feeling that I get sometimes when I'm deep in a TikTok doomscroll— the feeling that you're staring down into the abyss of the collective unconscious, and it's staring right back at you. It's pretty hard to describe to someone that hasn't experienced it, I think.