Phenomena began, like most creative things I do, with my favorite obsession/puzzle, the film Last Year at Marienbad. I was reading articles from BAMPFA’s CineFiles database, and came across this passage from an analysis by Freddy Sweet: "The key to understanding Marienbad is the realization that the very structure of the film is consciously designed… Continue reading Making Phenomena
Category: poems
New game: Phenomena
Hooray, new game alert! I just finished Phenomena, seven shifting stories about UFOs. It is an interactive poem, and a back garden entry in the 2022 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. I hope you like it (and if it’s not your cup of tea, that’s cool too ;)! Congratulations to everybody else who submitted… Continue reading New game: Phenomena
My favorite Bitsy games
I am fortunate to be employed and able to work from home. Since our shutdown began in late March, I’ve spent my weekends looking at prepper-adjacent product reviews (backpacks, camping percolators) on the internet, and trying to learn Bitsy (Adam Le Doux’s “little editor for little games or worlds”) by making small Bitsy games. I’ve… Continue reading My favorite Bitsy games
Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days
By the time the SNES came out, I had pretty much stopped playing videogames. This is why So Are the Days’s overall conceit is based on games from 30+ years ago: besides Twine games, those games (e.g., StarTropics, Bubble Bobble, Super Contra, Duke Nukem, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) are… Continue reading Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days
New game: So Are the Days
I just finished So Are the Days, tiny stories about sand and stories that behave like sand. It is a back garden entry in the 2020 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. I hope you like it! Take care.
A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”
The “space” inhabited by a poem has been conceptualized in terms of music or sound (e.g., Tracie Morris, John Cage), in terms of painting (e.g., Gertrude Stein, John Yau, John Ashbery), in terms of ritual (e.g., Bhanu Kapil, CAConrad). But what about in terms of, well, space? I was at the No Fair/Fair at AWP… Continue reading A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”
Making ROUND / SQUARE
Well, I have covered myself in hundreds of index cards again! This time to make ROUND / SQUARE, a micro game I submitted to sub-Q Magazine’s #subQjam. The prompt was to tell an interactive story about love in fewer than 1,000 words--1,000 words across ALL paths. In the way it distills each choice into two… Continue reading Making ROUND / SQUARE
ROUND / SQUARE
I just finished ROUND / SQUARE, a porous taxonomy created for #subQjam 2018. It's a 100-choice micro game on the subject of love. I hope you like it!
Favorite necropastoral games
I have spent much of this October making a silverfish costume out of duct tape and re-reading Joyelle McSweeney’s The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. In the book (and on the now-inactive blog Montevidayo), McSweeney explores a variety of texts that employ necropastoral strategies: Sylvia Plath's Ariel, CAConrad's The Book of Frank, Jack Smith's Normal Love,… Continue reading Favorite necropastoral games
Afraid of money take 2
The procedurally generated poems I posted about earlier have mutated into a branching Twine poem called, well, Afraid of Money. You can read it via the Orange Juice Public Library's division of Games and Such.
La Vie en Meow 
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