I think a deep deficit of latent anger is clawing its way out of the back of the skulls of grown survivors. I hope it colors everything that happens next. I was not harrowed by the introduction, because a broader category of people -- invisible -- -- I don't know how to say it, but you go insane if you can't say it to anyone, if no one else sees it and no one else admits it. In the end, you just have to let it burst. This burst vividly. It's self-evident. Sorry to invade your privacy by reading, but thank you for sharing.
thank you very much for reading. I read this feedback yesterday, and it was soothing to connect to someone - specifically the "if no one else sees, and no one else admits", which I think is a big piece I was wrestling with more directly in the back half of the story.
LIVE ORDINANCE AHEAD was, in hindsight, not even that metaphorical of a warning. this was a stroll through a psychic minefield, one i took willingly—though speaking of consent...
being faced, even before the story begins, with a forced denial of a plea for the reader to *not* begin this story, AKA explicitly placing the reader in the position of trespasser + witness + voyeur, is a brutally elegant piece of tone setting. i didn't expect anything less from you.
i won't do a play-by-play but the much remarked-upon furious opening is a breath of fresh air as much as it's the first live mine in the dirt. reading from my thirty-something vantage point, the foreword pierces through to the teen that graduated the year obama was elected + the nowhere girl back in 2016 who was only just beginning to contemplate transition when trump was elected + the woman who broke up with someone (earlier this year) when they refused to drop amazon because the person wanted to "remain practical".
not that it matters: in the grand scope, i myself am not part of any active solution, just a small piece of grit that barely registers as friction to those in power. the story begins.
the audio work in this thing, especially for it being your first VN, is immaculate. knuckles on window incandescent buzzing cars passing crickets chirping—but when the crickets stopped and the sobbing breaths started, it awed me a little.
the sense of place, especially for a place you aren't from, feels tangible, rooted, probably aided by at least having a sense of time to moor it all to—the christina grimmie reference didn't pass me by; i was listening to julia nunes back then.
the 2024 sequence, where Coral weighs her past behavior and past traumas hand-in-hand... being candid: that shit got me. my childhood and teen years are all littered with similar experiences, things that i could sexualize and sometimes do—the bully girls who circled me on bikes that i never learned to ride, etc etc etc—so it hit that much harder when sadie's name reappeared again, in the way that it did.
i'm getting personal here because it's affecting my ability to say unbiased things about the game: when the background from the road trip with sadie (my favorite one) was reused in the segment about the uhaul, talking about the ford motor company, i felt genuinely sick.
see, i worked at a ford dealership. not in sales, but still: for an entire decade of stagnant nothing, i trudged through the tarry mire of a proto-trump conservative proving ground because it paid better than anything else i could find in my shit town. it ate my soul and stunted me until i finally fled it less than a handful of years ago. it was that or kill myself.
the a/n at the end was almost too kind (the say anything track was a heady lil throwback), but i felt... well, i don't know if smug was the right word, reading the section on Coral's name. like her namesake, she's an animal of uncertain safety, striking at uncertain prey, in uncertain danger. i identify with her in many ways, unfortunately, and especially in being a kind of snake woman. (before i read this, i revisited "Snake Girl Girlfriend", the twine game you put out in late 2017. cute to see how far you've come, but that one still hits for me too, in its simple way.)
---
i'm deep enough in now to say: hi Jade. it's lovely to read more of your writing again. i still need to catch up on Burnouts in Paradise sometime. back in 2022 on twitter, you dmed me because i expressed interest in trying to find some old thread-stories of yours (Vagar, Heating Up) and you shared them with me. those old stories-by-post meant a lot to me, and were... really integral to helping me figure out what kinds of things i wanted to read and ultimately write. there was anger and discomfort and uncertainty in those stories, and i loved seeing those same things here too.
take your time; my entry currently ends in a cliffhanger abruptly before the act where everything is meant to come together. but soon, soon i'll find the time to complete it. all that said: i genuinely welcome any feedback (good or bad) if and when you play it.
Fuck, what a horribly beautiful (and strangely kinda nostalgic) VN. That ending playlist and accolades feel fucking earned.
Also, that intro fuuuuuck. Is making games really like... activism against censorship and the payment processor stuff? A few tokens are a win, and all those other ones are just gonna be lost to time and forgotten and erased?
I have some fairly strong political opinions, that start coming thru right out of the gate, but someone in the fluxer during the first week of the jam summed it up better than I ever could: "nothing is revolutionary except revolution." It was embarrassing to read that when I was like 2000ish words into the story already, haha.
Still, it felt important to include and to help shape the themes of the game.
this kicked ass and i'm excited to give it a reread in short order. you like took the feeling of "like seriously what is the fucking point of like having experiences and feelings and wounds and trying to what sculpt them into some sort of work that is also a knife that is also a key? when the world is the fucking world???" which, god, and you crumpled it up into a little ball and rammed it down my throat and i thank you for it
also your prose is killer, also Like Eating Glass came up in a poem we wrote recently so that's a neat bit of synchronicity, also i really dig that you went about fitting it to a younger generation. i think i fear (maybe irrationally) i'm going to be telling stories that feel irrelevant because they are set in like 2005 or whatever and it's like "how the hell could that even map onto things now"
you'll eat your reality check, and you'll clean your plate, and you'll like it!
joking aside, thank you so much for playing. hearing this means the world from you, as Not Bernadette Mayer was kind of a mindmelter for me, in a big way, as I've touched on lightly already. I have enormous respect for your craft.
2 things on Time:
1. 2005 rules, you should tell stories set in 2005 if you have them to tell.
2. Getting old is crazy. Can't believe I made it this far. Thank God people don't change that much from one decade to the next and generations aren't really real.
I liked it. I liked the bitterness, found some of it relatable even if I never put the thoughts to words before... I liked the quiet and discomforting moments shown without a particular care for any one participant within them. It was interesting.
phenomenal prose and dialogue writing. and the fact that this is your first visual novel? what a debut.
hard-hitting intro aside, reading through each chapter felt like a perfect snapshot into the hell that is 2010s-2020s america. #giveelsaagirlfriend, late-night talks about gendered socialization expectations (that one reminded me of some uncomfortable social encounters i had), how every act of ours is recorded, connected to someone else's suffering. the exhaustion and cynicism that comes with witnessing said suffering on a daily basis.
Exactly the kind of hate and anger I want to see. I adore the explicity of this, the frustration, the breaking apart of the idea that art is activism at the start. Thank you for making this piece, and for sharing it.
thank you for reading it, and for everything. the jam has been an energizing experience, though at this point I don't really know what, if anything, that it can accomplish politically/organizationally. hoping that more people get out and get connected enough to really start causing trouble.
thank you for playing. be good to yourself. self-soothe, stabilize, and when you're ready: talk about these feelings with loved ones sooner rather than later, even if you don't have all the words.
you know i was pretty alienated from the jam alreadyas is, but yeah it is frustrating how much of a monument to nothing that traps the energies of the most vulnerable it is, im mad, i live a bad life and this vn made me upset, and i cant direct that at anything i guess im just too tired and pathethic and faking it
thanks for checking it out, glad you got something out of it. it's nice to hear that the intro hit hard. that part was supposed to be pretty angry, so good to hear it did the thing, hopefully didn't put you off the rest of the game too much.
after few days the manic-visceral-anhedonic episode subsided, during which we have not given it at any point into any cheap form of eschatological belief, while seeing the world as a loveless wasteland. We've since reevaluated a lot about life and jam and your work.
As you noticed my comment focused on the beginning, it is strange reading the rest of the work and waiting for another punch like that, which just isn't coming. Its a very uneasy balance, and it took me out of experiencing your sharp prose on its own terms. I really like the alienation from the alienated aspect of it, its all very unsentimental and unindulgent. I see people describe it as bitter and cynical, but it lacks satisfaction of these tones, its more like disilusioned, negative, schizo (if im about to use psychological (fascist) language) or most succintly: anhedonic
I guess theres a certain tendency here describing your work in what it isnt, definition from negatives, deduction and it does seem like the easiest mode of describing this, and it is yuri of absence after all. Aspect that I havent seen anyone else bring up: there is a certain disilusionment that is merely implied; namely the lack of contrast between vapidity of "straight" "culture and the "queer""culture""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
When I got to the end I thought the whole afterword was sarcastic, all the thanks seemed completely out of place in a work with such foreword, but now I thought about it more and I think I get it, or at least im projecting really hard.
in a jam where everyone sees psychosexuality as rigid eschatological machinery, this work has an aggressive spark to it, its alive, its still standing
oh also also: i ended up thinking about how both of our jam >submissions< end up using voyeurism as a framing device , without saying too much, i think i know why is that
glad to hear that the anhedonic episode let up on you, and to my pleasure, your hedonic viewpoints are headily enriching to me.
i've gotten the sense that people really want an incendiary scene-devouring heater out of work after reading the opening salvo, but i think that the negative/schizo/anhedonic stuff that you're targeting was definitely more my point over all - creating ambiguity, negative space, and the protective layers out of mood swings, and lying the outward rage at the start, crumbling and going wet and cold by the end.
i really appreciate you calling out the complementary nature of the straight culture/queer culture scenes. i didnt want to create an illusion that queer communities are somehow a paradise or whatever. i wanted to create a backdrop that would make sense for someone to feel "I tried to run away, but in the end I couldn't escape, cuz im still surrounded by people".
i dont think that sarcasm is exactly correct for the afterword, yeah. that was originally the idea as a joke, before i actually wrote the story, but when i got to the end, i decided "the reality is i just hold two worldviews. what if im angry and im grateful?" i think in this particular scene that there can be a lot of value in anger that gratitude can't really replicate - i think people are often too nice or too dishonest with their dishonesty, and i think that anger can provide a cutting clarity in those kinds of situations. but also i wanted to do the jam and i wanted to have fun. im really glad that in the end it really spoke to you.
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I think a deep deficit of latent anger is clawing its way out of the back of the skulls of grown survivors. I hope it colors everything that happens next. I was not harrowed by the introduction, because a broader category of people -- invisible -- -- I don't know how to say it, but you go insane if you can't say it to anyone, if no one else sees it and no one else admits it. In the end, you just have to let it burst. This burst vividly. It's self-evident. Sorry to invade your privacy by reading, but thank you for sharing.
thank you very much for reading. I read this feedback yesterday, and it was soothing to connect to someone - specifically the "if no one else sees, and no one else admits", which I think is a big piece I was wrestling with more directly in the back half of the story.
cheers, and be well!
LIVE ORDINANCE AHEAD was, in hindsight, not even that metaphorical of a warning. this was a stroll through a psychic minefield, one i took willingly—though speaking of consent...
being faced, even before the story begins, with a forced denial of a plea for the reader to *not* begin this story, AKA explicitly placing the reader in the position of trespasser + witness + voyeur, is a brutally elegant piece of tone setting. i didn't expect anything less from you.
i won't do a play-by-play but the much remarked-upon furious opening is a breath of fresh air as much as it's the first live mine in the dirt. reading from my thirty-something vantage point, the foreword pierces through to the teen that graduated the year obama was elected + the nowhere girl back in 2016 who was only just beginning to contemplate transition when trump was elected + the woman who broke up with someone (earlier this year) when they refused to drop amazon because the person wanted to "remain practical".
not that it matters: in the grand scope, i myself am not part of any active solution, just a small piece of grit that barely registers as friction to those in power. the story begins.
the audio work in this thing, especially for it being your first VN, is immaculate. knuckles on window incandescent buzzing cars passing crickets chirping—but when the crickets stopped and the sobbing breaths started, it awed me a little.
the sense of place, especially for a place you aren't from, feels tangible, rooted, probably aided by at least having a sense of time to moor it all to—the christina grimmie reference didn't pass me by; i was listening to julia nunes back then.
the 2024 sequence, where Coral weighs her past behavior and past traumas hand-in-hand... being candid: that shit got me. my childhood and teen years are all littered with similar experiences, things that i could sexualize and sometimes do—the bully girls who circled me on bikes that i never learned to ride, etc etc etc—so it hit that much harder when sadie's name reappeared again, in the way that it did.
i'm getting personal here because it's affecting my ability to say unbiased things about the game: when the background from the road trip with sadie (my favorite one) was reused in the segment about the uhaul, talking about the ford motor company, i felt genuinely sick.
see, i worked at a ford dealership. not in sales, but still: for an entire decade of stagnant nothing, i trudged through the tarry mire of a proto-trump conservative proving ground because it paid better than anything else i could find in my shit town. it ate my soul and stunted me until i finally fled it less than a handful of years ago. it was that or kill myself.
the a/n at the end was almost too kind (the say anything track was a heady lil throwback), but i felt... well, i don't know if smug was the right word, reading the section on Coral's name. like her namesake, she's an animal of uncertain safety, striking at uncertain prey, in uncertain danger. i identify with her in many ways, unfortunately, and especially in being a kind of snake woman. (before i read this, i revisited "Snake Girl Girlfriend", the twine game you put out in late 2017. cute to see how far you've come, but that one still hits for me too, in its simple way.)
---
i'm deep enough in now to say: hi Jade. it's lovely to read more of your writing again. i still need to catch up on Burnouts in Paradise sometime. back in 2022 on twitter, you dmed me because i expressed interest in trying to find some old thread-stories of yours (Vagar, Heating Up) and you shared them with me. those old stories-by-post meant a lot to me, and were... really integral to helping me figure out what kinds of things i wanted to read and ultimately write. there was anger and discomfort and uncertainty in those stories, and i loved seeing those same things here too.
thanks for making Be Normal.
:'(
I'm gonna freak the fuck out, I'm so honored.
With your reminder, I remember digging those up for you. I'm so glad to see hear that you've stepped into writing too.
This game review is a heartbreaker, and it fills me with all the more dread (and excitement) to play your game jam entry too.
I'm gonna read and reread this review no less then fifteen times, I promise you.
take your time; my entry currently ends in a cliffhanger abruptly before the act where everything is meant to come together. but soon, soon i'll find the time to complete it. all that said: i genuinely welcome any feedback (good or bad) if and when you play it.
Fuck, what a horribly beautiful (and strangely kinda nostalgic) VN. That ending playlist and accolades feel fucking earned.
Also, that intro fuuuuuck. Is making games really like... activism against censorship and the payment processor stuff? A few tokens are a win, and all those other ones are just gonna be lost to time and forgotten and erased?
Goddam I. Good game. Yeah.
omg, thank you so much for playing.
I have some fairly strong political opinions, that start coming thru right out of the gate, but someone in the fluxer during the first week of the jam summed it up better than I ever could: "nothing is revolutionary except revolution." It was embarrassing to read that when I was like 2000ish words into the story already, haha.
Still, it felt important to include and to help shape the themes of the game.
Cheers!
this kicked ass and i'm excited to give it a reread in short order. you like took the feeling of "like seriously what is the fucking point of like having experiences and feelings and wounds and trying to what sculpt them into some sort of work that is also a knife that is also a key? when the world is the fucking world???" which, god, and you crumpled it up into a little ball and rammed it down my throat and i thank you for it
also your prose is killer, also Like Eating Glass came up in a poem we wrote recently so that's a neat bit of synchronicity, also i really dig that you went about fitting it to a younger generation. i think i fear (maybe irrationally) i'm going to be telling stories that feel irrelevant because they are set in like 2005 or whatever and it's like "how the hell could that even map onto things now"
you'll eat your reality check, and you'll clean your plate, and you'll like it!
joking aside, thank you so much for playing. hearing this means the world from you, as Not Bernadette Mayer was kind of a mindmelter for me, in a big way, as I've touched on lightly already. I have enormous respect for your craft.
2 things on Time:
1. 2005 rules, you should tell stories set in 2005 if you have them to tell.
2. Getting old is crazy. Can't believe I made it this far. Thank God people don't change that much from one decade to the next and generations aren't really real.
I liked it. I liked the bitterness, found some of it relatable even if I never put the thoughts to words before... I liked the quiet and discomforting moments shown without a particular care for any one participant within them. It was interesting.
I'm glad that it was able to connect! I hope you have a good rest of your day.
phenomenal prose and dialogue writing. and the fact that this is your first visual novel? what a debut.
hard-hitting intro aside, reading through each chapter felt like a perfect snapshot into the hell that is 2010s-2020s america. #giveelsaagirlfriend, late-night talks about gendered socialization expectations (that one reminded me of some uncomfortable social encounters i had), how every act of ours is recorded, connected to someone else's suffering. the exhaustion and cynicism that comes with witnessing said suffering on a daily basis.
thank you for making this!
thanks so much for playing!
Exactly the kind of hate and anger I want to see. I adore the explicity of this, the frustration, the breaking apart of the idea that art is activism at the start. Thank you for making this piece, and for sharing it.
thank you for reading it, and for everything. the jam has been an energizing experience, though at this point I don't really know what, if anything, that it can accomplish politically/organizationally. hoping that more people get out and get connected enough to really start causing trouble.
raw, cynical and like holding up a mirror
thank you for playing. love you, be well.
really really good. i feel kind of nauseous and jittery after playing this. touches on a lot of things ive been thinking about.
thank you for playing. be good to yourself. self-soothe, stabilize, and when you're ready: talk about these feelings with loved ones sooner rather than later, even if you don't have all the words.
you know i was pretty alienated from the jam alreadyas is, but yeah it is frustrating how much of a monument to nothing that traps the energies of the most vulnerable it is, im mad, i live a bad life and this vn made me upset, and i cant direct that at anything i guess im just too tired and pathethic and faking it
thanks for checking it out, glad you got something out of it. it's nice to hear that the intro hit hard. that part was supposed to be pretty angry, so good to hear it did the thing, hopefully didn't put you off the rest of the game too much.
hang in there.
after few days the manic-visceral-anhedonic episode subsided, during which we have not given it at any point into any cheap form of eschatological belief, while seeing the world as a loveless wasteland. We've since reevaluated a lot about life and jam and your work.
As you noticed my comment focused on the beginning, it is strange reading the rest of the work and waiting for another punch like that, which just isn't coming. Its a very uneasy balance, and it took me out of experiencing your sharp prose on its own terms. I really like the alienation from the alienated aspect of it, its all very unsentimental and unindulgent. I see people describe it as bitter and cynical, but it lacks satisfaction of these tones, its more like disilusioned, negative, schizo (if im about to use psychological (fascist) language) or most succintly: anhedonic
I guess theres a certain tendency here describing your work in what it isnt, definition from negatives, deduction and it does seem like the easiest mode of describing this, and it is yuri of absence after all.
Aspect that I havent seen anyone else bring up: there is a certain disilusionment that is merely implied; namely the lack of contrast between vapidity of "straight" "culture and the "queer""culture""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
When I got to the end I thought the whole afterword was sarcastic, all the thanks seemed completely out of place in a work with such foreword, but now I thought about it more and I think I get it, or at least im projecting really hard.
in a jam where everyone sees psychosexuality as rigid eschatological machinery, this work has an aggressive spark to it, its alive, its still standing
thank you
oh also also: i ended up thinking about how both of our jam >submissions< end up using voyeurism as a framing device , without saying too much, i think i know why is that
:face_with_hand_over_mouth_emoji:
glad to hear that the anhedonic episode let up on you, and to my pleasure, your hedonic viewpoints are headily enriching to me.
i've gotten the sense that people really want an incendiary scene-devouring heater out of work after reading the opening salvo, but i think that the negative/schizo/anhedonic stuff that you're targeting was definitely more my point over all - creating ambiguity, negative space, and the protective layers out of mood swings, and lying the outward rage at the start, crumbling and going wet and cold by the end.
i really appreciate you calling out the complementary nature of the straight culture/queer culture scenes. i didnt want to create an illusion that queer communities are somehow a paradise or whatever. i wanted to create a backdrop that would make sense for someone to feel "I tried to run away, but in the end I couldn't escape, cuz im still surrounded by people".
i dont think that sarcasm is exactly correct for the afterword, yeah. that was originally the idea as a joke, before i actually wrote the story, but when i got to the end, i decided "the reality is i just hold two worldviews. what if im angry and im grateful?" i think in this particular scene that there can be a lot of value in anger that gratitude can't really replicate - i think people are often too nice or too dishonest with their dishonesty, and i think that anger can provide a cutting clarity in those kinds of situations. but also i wanted to do the jam and i wanted to have fun. im really glad that in the end it really spoke to you.
Deeply unpleasant! Thank you!
thanks for taking a look, i'm glad you unenjoyed.