For those who missed my relentless shilling for it and were confused by the structure and content of last week’s Request Line, it was an homage to Jon Bois’ speculative piece of multimedia fiction 17776.

Something about that piece really struck a chord with me.  I read most of it in a single day, and the remainder in the evening while getting blitzed.  The sense of hopelessness, the idea that humanity within the story is essentially over, that the universe sadly holds no new wonders that can’t be perceived through a telescope, is offset by a set of hopefulness that seems to defy explanation. I really, really enjoyed it.

There’s a book called “House of Leaves” that I’ve never actually read, that plays games with how the text is laid out, arranging text in certain ways to better portray events in the narrative.  There’s a Russian film called “Night Watch” which does the same with subtitles, expanding their size based on the volume of the speaker, or having the letters dissolve away in water.  17776 similarly uses the flexibility that the web provides in order to enhance its story. I wish this happened more often, but it’s fairly rare that a piece of art takes complete advantage of all the options that its medium provides, and even more rare that it’s actually worthy of it.

Between this and Battlebots, it’s probably weird that I find robots more relatable than humans though, right?

Pick of the week goes to JerBear50 for his selection of John Prine’s “Living in the Future” cause goddamn if I’m not a sucker for that man’s music.  This is a fantastic playlist because you’re going to hear a lot of music that you’ve never heard before.  Enjoy, and here’s the Spotify link.