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ren'py game jam submission at wonderville

this weekend i participated in a game jam at wonderville. we had 2hrs to learn ren’py and make a game with it. in my team, i did the writing. all this below was in ~1hr, no erasing, no thinking ahead. it was fun, huh

also, note, it doesnt actually use any ai. that’s a lie, or maybe an attemt to seem more modern

2025-5 weekly post

Writing

continued revisions this week for ‘the girl’. disassociation and derealism’s begun. in essence, i worked on the part where its just a line of uncomfortably sequenced short stories with only hints of delineation, so of course i love these parts

in addition:

• messing with more heightened kossler fantasy voice. is it tending too bolaño or bernhard? perhaps. but that just leads to more joyful revision.
• submitted somewhere. tbh i forget, cause im not back to keeping records yet. hope they adore me

Other projects

drafting out new devlogs for my ants, often away from home and on my phone, in lines for bathrooms

Books

of note:

• started JG Ballard high rise, hell yes
• back to Solenoid (taking in a section again as audiobook). by the time i finish ill likely have been reading for six months
• read a couple tiny indie comix

Other media

• Ethel Cain never made sense to me till Perverts. Now I will defend her to the death
• i liked this talk
• saw Dan Deacon perform at a ballet; it was so damn good that he wasn’t even the highlight

ants devlog 1

to live is to struggle, of course, as well to die; pico-8 is a fantasy computer console.

in pico-8 i am simulating bugs. it is clear they aren’t actual bugs, but bugs are the smallest creature i’ve seen that was also living (in high school, with microscopes, we made the bacteria die). therefore i am calling my creatures bugs, as a tip of the hat to the fact that they are living (or in other words outside of my control)

world

first we must create a world for them to live in. pico8 offers three default functions, _init(), _draw(), and _update() (or, in our case, the closely related _update60() to do something similar in 60fps) to simulate our world, so let’s start with these

_init() creates our world. at the moment we will be existentialists and encounter it as given. thus we will not touch upon it now

_update60() creates action in our world. now, as perhaps idealists, we will ignore this for now.

_draw() in fact is all we need to create our world. software after all is not concerned with reality, only representation, thank god. thus, we need only add the color of dirt to our draw function, as dirt is the insects’ natural home. pico-8 uses a integer index-based color palatte, so let’s draw with that now:

function _draw()
    cls(4)
end

what does this mean? _draw(), run every frame, will create an image of all we’ve made. within in, cls() paints the screen a single color ¹, which we’ve set to 4, in other words brown, the color of earth

every second, in other words, we will be reminded the earth is brown. i find this wonderful

our world so far: so much dirt

reading, 2025 week 4

of note:

• read Paul Celan for the first time. holy shit is that the shit. beautiful nonsense that becomes, within two lines, suddenly devastating

writing, 2025 week 4

last week, i started revisions on my little novel of derealization, The Girl, and continued on it this week. been doing it mostly during lunch breaks, for about an hour, and took the weekend off. our girl just made her way through the third door. things will soon unravel

also: attempted an intro paragraph to reimagined versions of Kossler! in my head while walking to the library, then on my phone in the cold outside, struggling to move my fingers right. lets hope its worth it