So This Is Funny
I'm sure this has happened to you before. I began an experiment a while back, maybe two months after I first joined hitrecord. I basically would wake up early one or two days a week and write down the very first full sentence that came to my mind, then spend a while trying to make something out of it. The first one took a few minutes, and ended up becoming the fourth page of a book that doesn't exist, entitled The Maelstrom Book.
By the time the second week came around, I'd decided that my future games of this nature would have to tie into the original, though not necessarily in chronological order - I'd started with page four, after all. The numbering of each subsequent page would be done after the piece was somewhat fleshed out, so that while the page itself would usually come out as mostly gibberish, I could exercise some degree of conscious control over the story.
I did one or two more before a story arc formed in my head. The Maelstrom Book was to be a cluster of carefully organized poems/stories/essays/instructions designed to reboot the memory of whoever read it through some weird subliminal code that only made sense once the entire book was read in the proper order.
My first instinct was "meh, now my game is ruined", and I stopped writing them. But about an hour ago, I coughed myself awake from a fever dream and remembered I wrote this little short about Alzheimer's, and its effect on one particular woman. It went nowhere, but I figured it'd be fun to connect the two ideas - the book, in its "published" form, would be purposefully out of order, so Page Four is not necessarily the "real" page four of the reboot procedure. The entire tome would serve as a puzzle then, and help this person afflicted with a terrible disease keep their mind active as they strove to solve the mystery and get the order right.
The reward, at first in my mind, would be some sort of instant restoration, with the hidden message representing some mathematical formula that cured all disease for anyone who understood it. And of course, you could only understand it if you took it in through the coded pages of the Maelstrom Book. Then I got sleepy, and a little cynical, and decided the "reward" was in fact a ruse, and piecing the book together in the proper order would simply finish the job of wiping her memory clean, to the point where she no longer remembers the disease or who she is, and will live the rest of her life ignorant and unaware of her past struggle.
But that was just too messed up, so I decided to stop again. Having not actually written more, all it took to officiallty stop this time was to close my eyes and resume my fever dream.
But that was an hour ago, and I am still awake. I think. I'm almost certain I'm writing this, or at least know it to be true. I mean, I must've done all that stuff I wrote up there, because there's no ending to the book...right?
There can't be an ending, because i don't remember writing one.
So this is funny...
By the time the second week came around, I'd decided that my future games of this nature would have to tie into the original, though not necessarily in chronological order - I'd started with page four, after all. The numbering of each subsequent page would be done after the piece was somewhat fleshed out, so that while the page itself would usually come out as mostly gibberish, I could exercise some degree of conscious control over the story.
I did one or two more before a story arc formed in my head. The Maelstrom Book was to be a cluster of carefully organized poems/stories/essays/instructions designed to reboot the memory of whoever read it through some weird subliminal code that only made sense once the entire book was read in the proper order.
My first instinct was "meh, now my game is ruined", and I stopped writing them. But about an hour ago, I coughed myself awake from a fever dream and remembered I wrote this little short about Alzheimer's, and its effect on one particular woman. It went nowhere, but I figured it'd be fun to connect the two ideas - the book, in its "published" form, would be purposefully out of order, so Page Four is not necessarily the "real" page four of the reboot procedure. The entire tome would serve as a puzzle then, and help this person afflicted with a terrible disease keep their mind active as they strove to solve the mystery and get the order right.
The reward, at first in my mind, would be some sort of instant restoration, with the hidden message representing some mathematical formula that cured all disease for anyone who understood it. And of course, you could only understand it if you took it in through the coded pages of the Maelstrom Book. Then I got sleepy, and a little cynical, and decided the "reward" was in fact a ruse, and piecing the book together in the proper order would simply finish the job of wiping her memory clean, to the point where she no longer remembers the disease or who she is, and will live the rest of her life ignorant and unaware of her past struggle.
But that was just too messed up, so I decided to stop again. Having not actually written more, all it took to officiallty stop this time was to close my eyes and resume my fever dream.
But that was an hour ago, and I am still awake. I think. I'm almost certain I'm writing this, or at least know it to be true. I mean, I must've done all that stuff I wrote up there, because there's no ending to the book...right?
There can't be an ending, because i don't remember writing one.
So this is funny...
