(art by rappu)
OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING
Most of these were originally given on tumblr.
Some Words About Rapture: The Basic Premise
ACT I: THE COMING OF THE FOUR RAKES
Act 1 Poster: Wiratomkinder's Post-Modern Creep
May 26: “Mistress Dread,” and the aubade
May 29: more “Mistress Dread”
May 29: you wouldn’t dissect a frog (fractions)
June 2: “The Dark Eternal Night”
June 4: “We Excavate”
June 5: WOMP WOMP, a little picture into the comedy of act 1
June 8: June 1, and the comedy of Dream Theater
June 10: Metahorror, the Arc of the Audience Expectations (The First Real Ramble of Act 1)
June 10: Rapture Art, and the Delineation of “Fanart”
June 11: The Egg Dance
June 21: Tally Marks Ramble 1 (The Unfunny Jokester)
June 22: Tally Marks Ramble 2 (Laziness and Work)
June 23: Tally Marks Ramble 3 (On the Slender Man, I: Blurring Boundaries)
June 25: didn’t wanna ramble. too hot. rambled anyway. (Roman a Clef, Act 1)
June 27: Serials
June 29: Rael’s Exodus
July 4: Act 1 Finale
ACT II: SEVEN CIPHERS
Act 2 Poster: RealaChao's Big Dramatic Boss Battle
July 5: “A voice speaks to me / Do you want to see?”
July 6: Mister Ginger, Doing It Right
July 8: The Thesis of Act 2
July 14: Fear, not necessarily Horror (A Real Ramble)
July 18: writing Tiresias is weird
July 22: from Vague to Travel Episode
July 23: Entire Stories Within Stories (swamp queen ramble)
July 25: “Solitude”
July 26: like a director
July 28: So. San Francisco. (the san francisco ramble)
July 28: Elon Musk
July 31: The Seventh Cipher (king real ramble, with concept art!)
An Aside: Beautiful Empty
Aug 1: Writing a Finale
Aug 4: I Owe You A Ramble Here
Aug 7: Burnout
Hello. Today from my perspective is May 20th, 2024. I'm about to start posting the final draft of Rapture. I won't be done with that until around the end of this year. But I still want to say some things about the story, so I'll keep the talk broad. There are many more things I will have the opportunity to say as we get further into the story, and plus I will surely revise the things I say about the story over time, so check back later, I dunno.
Rapture is probably the most ambitious thing I've ever done, fuelled by the most enthusiasm I've ever had for any of my projects. It began as a simple improvised short story I wrote on May 21st, 2011, for an audience of Facebook friends, with a simple conceit: another American Christian fundamentalist was saying the Rapture was gonna come on that date, so I wrote my own silly account of how I survived the bizarre apocalypse that came on that day. My friends loved this silly story a lot more than I had anticipated. But, a friend pointed out to me, that man had changed his story-- Rapture only began on May 21st, and it wouldn't actually come until October 21st. That gave me an opportunity to continue the story, if I wanted to.
Meanwhile, I had recently joined this writing community called the Fear Mythos (and I was in the middle of writing Jordan Eats Normally Now, a story in a format a bit out of my comfort zone), so I was in the neighborhood for a new ongoing story that could go a bit horror, a bit experimental, a bit Internet. Some wheels were aligning in my head. I could do something with this Rapture thing.
Now, the format of that original story dictated how the rest of the story would go. It had involved a farcical caricature of myself, carrying a journal around with him, writing the hour-minute timestamp and some contents of what's going on at that minute. This allowed for a style I call "hyperblogging," because it's like blogging but so much more constant. See, in a regular fictional blog story, the narrator is limited by what he feels like saying when he has sat down at the computer for the day. This tends to result in broad posts that recall the events of a day, or a week, with the occasional focused and detailed Event if it's something that made a distinct enough impression in the narrator's mind. I had been losing interest in this style for Jordan Eats, and here was this Rapture story where I could take a "blogger" narrator and force him to write as often as possible (He has a journal, he's a talkative teenager, and something batshit insane is happening all around him. He wants to write as often as possible). So, hyperblogging! It's not microblogging, though many entries are a few words long; there are plenty of entries that are as long as, if not longer than, your average blog post. This was a pretty freeform format, length dictated by content and character.
In practice, while I'm pretty sure I did not go into this story expecting this, Rapture ended up as my single longest story. A lot happens in it, and we get to see it happen up close for a full five-month period. But more than that, I also wanted Rapture to be my most readable story, something which is harder to articulate and may even seem surprising to those who are familiar with it.
Rapture has its own format, its own writing style, its own canon and timeline, and its own logic for how characters behave. It is filled with swear words, sex and violence, and bleak portraits of a global trauma. It is narrated by a 16-year-old boy who thinks trilbies are cool. Like, I get it, there's plenty of things that make Rapture not a story For Everyone. But there's something about the journal style as a distinct format from prose or poetry-- somewhere in between both-- coupled with Jordan's core belief that everything can make sense-- that results in a story that.. is very easy to follow. I actually have to put conscious, playful effort in when I want a plot point to be harder to understand. As an author, I wanted Rapture's difficulties to all be the result of my own choice; I wanted Rapture to be an adrenaline-filled throughline passing through a long puzzle plot. This is why it took so long to make.
Now, you've probably got some questions. I will end this general pre-story ramble by listing some questions I predict you might have:
I had asked my buddy wiratom for a piece matching this description around the time I was setting up the First Edition in 2016. I had given a rough description of the contents, and I had specified that I wanted something of a vaguely unsettling post-modern texture, as that was the kind of creepiness I saw in the contents, which had never been illustrated before. Frankly, I think wiratom nailed it. My love for this piece is strong and lasting. It’s been eight years and I still can’t believe this piece exists.
Who are the characters depicted? Well, that little splotch of blonde is Jordan, I can tell you that. Why did I decide to make this piece the Act I poster, representative of an entire chunk of the story? It just made sense, okay. And it will be obvious to you by the time we’re done.
The May 26th log is subtitled “Aubade feat. Mistress Dread.”
A serenade is a love song given in the nighttime. An aubade is a love song given in the morning.
“Mistress Dread” is a song from 2011, from an album that I happen to care about very passionately.
No song from this album appears in Rapture, as the album came out in November, well past the cutoff date for appropriate music references. However, November was kind of a super traumatic month for me, and I spent much of it writing Rapture, listening to albums including this one on headphones, very loudly.
That is the shallow reason why this song is relevant to the story. But if you give this song a listen, I think you’ll find a very potent mood and themes.
the log where She is introduced is called “Aubade feat. Mistress Dread” for a lot of stated reasons, but also because dread is absolutely how the reader is supposed to feel.
it isn’t quite right, is it? everything is wrong. anyone can predict, right from Moment 1, that we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. with every new log, we wait to see what alarming new detail will hit us in the face. with every new log, we read on with morbid curiosity. the interactions get weirder. we learn a little too much. we don’t know what the story will even do with that information. we’re still early enough that we’re just kinda hoping this story can be trusted to pull some ambitious things off. we’re still early enough that it still feels like we’re just reading a young kid’s Fic.
dread. :)
dread… :)
dread.
I’m realizing I do have rambles in me for diving into the specifics of act 1, why it is the way it is. I like to think I can justify every detail.
but I’m also realizing that, like. explaining them now will tip you off on what to pay attention to, how to pay attention to it, and how it might change. frankly, I am really into stories that change, and it’s frustrating to me to hear too many solid indicators beforehand, so that’s influencing my decision here. you wouldn’t dissect a Frog Fractions during someone else’s blind playthrough.
“The Dark Eternal Night” was a heavy and jazzy Dream Theater song I had loved from the moment I heard it. It’s about Nyarlathotep. The lyrics are pretty damn cool. But the instrumental passages are just… they are Moods for me. Absolute carnage. Keeping track of the melody is a Challenge.
As Rapture was a story I was writing that had dark gods in it, I would listen to this song a lot, and it probably influenced the mood, especially of Act 1.
Today’s log excerpts and discusses the background of a song called “We Excavate,” title track for a Sunsetters album by the same name.
This is another of those songs that doesn’t actually exist, but over the several years between drafts, Bones and I wrote a demonstration of what the song would probably be like. (The whole album, in fact. Did you not know about the Sunsetters project? We’ve done four whole albums of fictional prog rock, as of the writing of this text.)
This song had to nail a particular mood, a particular kind of metal. It had to be plausible that Jordan at 16 would love this song. I think we succeeded at that. And, naturally, studying Sunsetters will heighten your appreciation of Rapture.
lyrics:
Taste the lightning’s sweetness on the wind
As it tears you from your resting place.
Old sea gods speak rays of accusation.
Hear them chanting:
“We excavate souls”
And taste the lightning
Bolting down the deep
See the masses
See them decompose
As up the current
Something rides the light
Power in a surge of electric branches
Painful uproot of corpse mound derelict
Up go the souls to feed the king
Fading thunder
And nothing remains
At the foyer
Of the global mains
Yet there you are
One the gods forgot
Daren’t go backwards
Carry on your thought
Estuary open ocean song
Underwater tidal current pulls you on with its song
Sea floor leaves you a colossal drop
More things in heaven and earth and the ocean than are dreamed
Feels like flying, falling down the deep
Only me to guide you, the voice in your head, you and me
Hear that rumbling from the dark below
God made the abyss so He’d be not a–
Song from above and a song from below
Current above and a current below
Thunder above and there’s pressure below
Great fish above, great fishes below
But you’re heading downard, slowly drifting down, you’ve got time
We excavate, we excavate time
What pathetic existence, what did you learn from the gods?
What will you learn? What’s at the bottom?
Made the abyss so He’d be not alone.
Why did they spare your life?
What did they intend?
Great noise, and it’s over;
Sweet sensation.
The gods are gone, leaving you.
You hit the reef, take a breath.
The least rumble still sends you into a wave function.
Are you up above?
Are you down below me?
god act 1 is so slow. there’s so many days, and the logs are so short.
I MEAN HELLO YES, june 5th is up. on the website too. this arc is gettin’ wacky! :D there’s a mention of bonnjo vjonsped, another fake band, though lindsay and I have never actually made a bonnjo vjonsped album. which is a critical failure on our part.
the name is entirely from a silly inside joke between lindsay and I. lindsay had said they’d read a review of a dragonforce album that said they sounded like “bon jovi on speed,” only I wasn’t entirely listening, so I assumed they’d said the name of some band I hadn’t heard of. some swedish black metal band, lindsay loves the black metal bands I’ve never heard of. “bonnjo vjonsped” is the spelling we came up with. I must have been fifteen at the time we made that joke. so that speaks for the depth of the humor.
none of this matters, of course, as they’re just a one-time joke mentioned in this log and nowhere else. :D
also, here’s a fake album cover I whipped up years later.
this is the kind of band I see them as being. but also they have a weird phase where they mess with electronic instruments, and that’s where the WOMP WOMP album comes from.
I’m pretty sure WOMP WOMP was even in the original draft. it feels like the kind of joke I’d add in later editing, but, no, it was just there. the real purpose was to introduce the words “womp womp,” introduce dubstep, because that will get prominence later!
“djay, everyone knows that dubstep sounds like WUB WUB. where did WOMP WOMP come from? were you trying to be different?”
No, actually, I have an explanation for that too! I was predisposed to like that onomatopoeia because I was a Dream Theater fan. and there is a song in their fifth album (Metropolis, pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory), the sixth scene, track 8, “Home,” which goes unexpectedly hard, way harder than it really has a right to, it’s kinda a perfect metal song in the middle of an album that’s.. pretty mid to me. but, there’s a Main Riff in it, and when the Main Riff is introduced, the bass gets noisy and makes a very noticeable “WOMP WOMP” sound.
here is it:
the WOMP WOMP comes at 1:44.
it’s. ridiculously hype. and then it goes into the first verse, which is just fucking krunk, oh my god it’s sex on the ears? and that’s not even getting into the fact that after the second chorus we have a longggg bridge slowly building up in intensity while we literally hear, in our right ear, a woman having sex.
“Home” is sex in the ears. that’s just what it is.
so I already liked that phrasing. and I.. did not actually know much dubstep at the time. (I still don’t, come to think of it. my exposure to dubstep is and has always been very shallow. but I do know a bit more now.) I had an awareness of the cool dubstep wobbly sound. and I wanted to describe it as “WOMP WOMP.”
eat me.
thank you for listening!
forgot to bring this up a week ago, but, IN THE JUNE 1ST LOG, there is this moment:
even in the very first draft that is all that is said, and it is not explained What Is The Reference. but that’s just because it wasn’t really worth it to explain it in the story.
here is what is the reference.
now, look. I love dream theater. I always did. I took to them hardcore. I don’t like to make fun of them.
but Black Clouds & Silver Linings is kinda an unintentionally hilarious album. every song has something just a little silly about it. this was the first song, “A Nightmare to Remember,” which is, for all intents and purposes, a heavy metal classic with a beautiful middle section. super easy to go back and listen to. I love this song.
but there’s a damn. part. around the 11-minute mark. where mike portnoy, voice toned down a little, starts beefing out some metal vocals. some people really hate portnoy’s singing voice, I’m really tolerant of it, I like his voice, I even could like this part. but it’s such a baffling moment lyrically to give it that voice. the lyrics are like “the really traumatic moment is over! I have to live with these memories, but it’s okay! my family is okay! we survived the car crash! the doctors did a great job!”
and, at 11:46, he concludes this totally encouraging sweet climax with, as quoted above, “BY THE GRACE OF GOD ABOVE, EVERYONE SURVIVED! huaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh”
and, like. when I first heard it, it was like whatever. but it didn’t take long for me to realize, like. “actually this is fucking silly.” that metal growl is just, the absolute weirdest tone for this moment. the music calls for it, the lyrics don’t.
it. it makes me goddamn laugh.
for a little bit I also found it cringe, but now it just makes me smile.
and now it can make you smile!
can’t sleep. brain racing.
I guess I’ve got some more rapture stuff to say. because I feel like I’ve been doing a great job at talking about the ways Act 1 is Early and Different from this mysterious other place that the story goes, I’ve been doing a great job at talking soberly about it, not really standing behind it. and I need to put some confidence behind it.
because there is, absolutely, a part of me that is keeping Act 1 the way it is because I like it this way.
Act 1 is great because it is an entire-ass novel’s worth of words that do not read like any fucking novel, it doesn’t even read like some classic experimental novel, it doesn’t read like stream-of-conscious, it definitely doesn’t read like Ulysses (I was still a good three or four years out from when I read that). it reads more like… social media. one person’s feed. that also wasn’t intentional, but that is what it amounts to.
like a person’s social media feed, Act 1 serves to keep you updated on what’s going on with Jordan, and in the process, Act 1 exposes you to Jordan and gets you…. “familiar with” Jordan. it also exposes you to The Things That Are Happening, and gets your brain working with Imagining it and with Keeping Track. one of Jordan’s jobs, as the narrator of this story, is to help you with that, to imagine and reword things himself, and to try to keep track of some things himself. simple act of literary peristalsis, gets your brain.. moving along a path.
I say that Act 1 gets you “familiar with” Jordan because, even though we have already been through some trauma with him, and even though he has been embarrassingly open with his journal, we still don’t actually know that much about him, or why he does what he does. frankly, the fact that I didn’t just utterly fill the story, from word 1, with full in-depth Talking About Myself.. is the most fundamental surprise to me in hindsight, and is the reason I have always believed in this story. I was always Doing Something with it. even when I did not actually have solid plans.
Act 1 was written without solid plans for the future.
I knew the story would continue with logs for each day, I knew it would go until October 21st.
I did actually know how each arc of Act 1 would go, because I was basing the structure of Act 1 off of my actual summer, condensed into a June. 2011 was kind of an incredibly ambitious year for me, and if I explained it all to you here, you… wouldn’t believe it, and I’d retraumatize myself anyway. but I wrote it into rapture because I was trying to will it into.. working out.
so. so I knew how blackpool would go. I knew how spain would go. and I knew what would come at the end of this act, which we won’t get to for another… 20 days.
and I knew about the Harlequin. I had that worked out.
the thing. about the Harlequin.
is that even this, even the original draft which was uncensored, was me holding back.
I had originally, in fucking April, early May of 2011, been planning on buying a doll and making a horror vlog, starring myself and a doll. the doll would have been called “Harlequin.” this would have been movement 3 of Jordan Eats Normally Now.
I want that to sink in. especially for those who know what’s going to happen in the story.
the Harlequin, as my portrayal of the Fear Mythos’s Wooden Girl, in a twisted relationship with My Fucking Self-Insert, was going to be filmed.
and thankfully I decided against doing that.
but instead I incorporated it into rapture, fleshing out the ideas I had and giving them a chance to develop into.. some interesting stuff.
and when I was in spain, in real life, I had a nightmare about the Harlequin, and I woke up and drew her face from my dream, and I sent that drawing to my artist friend RealaChao and talked about the Harlequin, where this was coming from. and I continued to reason out why this plot had to happen the way it does.
this is all to say.
of all things in rapture, the Harlequin is the closest thing to a genuine fucking poetic idea that I was able to conceive at age 16. I was not writing my fantasies out for a public audience, but I was willing to let people believe it was as cynical as that. because this story was… working. it was working far better than Jordan Eats had been. ideas were popping, they were practically forming out of each other, even the format was giving me ideas. and if the story was working, that meant I could feel confident about it. and if I could feel confident about it, that means I could try to let it stand on its own, I could believe that it’s possible for people to just read it and get it.
the Harlequin is not me writing my fantasies out.
the Harlequin is “what if this thing I thought I wanted… hurt?”
it’s a fear.
and it’s a fear on top of being quite a metafictional horror, but that brings us back to Jordan himself.
Jordan, as a Character, makes rapture uncomfortable to read. he makes it more and more uncomfortable the more and more genuine he reads as.
because Jordan is a self-insert.
goddammit, I saw him as the self-insert, the one to humble any other author who wanted to piss around with the thought.
Jordan is a self-insert for a lot of reasons, and I mean a lot of reasons.
this was another thing I did, once, have an opportunity to change. after the story was first concluded and I got to revise the whole thing for a.. either a PDF release or the First Edition book release, I did consider changing Jordan’s name. I told my editor friend, slendyslayer, about this, I talked through it with them, because of course I fucking understand how it looks, how it feels as any given reader to read this fucking self-insert.
(I would have called him Rael.)
but, I decided against it. I stood by it.
because he would have still been a fucking self-insert, just hiding behind a different fucking name.
and the point of Jordan is he is the self-insert, he is how you do a fucking self-insert.
you own it.
it’s just honest.
but. right. metafictional horror.
I say rapture is a metafictional horror because.
I mean, don’t you feel it? just by reading it?
don’t you feel that question in the back of your head?
“should I be reading this? am I, like, allowed to read this?”
“aren’t these some real person’s actual, like. private thoughts? private urges?”
would you die of embarrassment if it was your teenage urges? placed there on the screen, or in the pages of a book, for posterity?
that is horror.
(there are… ways to do that part badly. and the original draft of rapture did.. some of it… very badly. and I got, rightfully, chewed out for that. and rapture’s not like that anymore. and it never will be. that was my own horror. but the Jordan stuff? nah, you’re allowed to read that. I promise.)
it’s also not, like, all horror all the time, because I’m a blasphemous son of a bitch who doesn’t believe in horror’s right to being a genre. I believe in stories’ rights to be scary at parts, but if a story is all scary all the time then it’s just a mean-spirited joke on the audience.
so.
Jordan is meant to make you feel uncomfortable, but then you’re supposed to sit with it, and rapture is a long enough story that it gives you plenty of time to sit with it. you become familiar with your discomfort, you identify your discomfort, you come to terms with your discomfort.
stage 1 of the reader’s intended arc with rapture is “oh my god, I’m staring into the face of the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
stage 2 is “huh. so that’s what it means. those are the implications of being known, that is what’s on the other side of the mortification.”
yes, I honestly did intend this shit even at age 16.
because this wasn’t my first self-insert. and neither was Jordan Eats.
I had been writing self-inserts for years. and I would continue to, for years. I still write self-inserts. and I am always thinking about why.
so.
act 1 is here to get you familiar with Jordan. you have to get past the self-insert part, and you need a lot of time to get past that.
you are free to formulate ideas on Jordan as a character. I earnestly hope readers do. I want to see where people are proven right and proven wrong. engaging with the story will pay off.
act 1 is likewise here to get you familiar with Donnie.
Donnie is not a self-insert. Donnie is not even based on a real person.
Donnie is a.. few things. I don’t know that I will get into the Donnie Depths right now. but I will just throw out there, as trivia, that I wrote Donnie into the story because of Stephen King.
in 2010 I read Stephen King’s Cell. and I really, really dug it. frankly, a lot of the vibes of Act 1 were fueled by admiration of Stephen King. Cell is about a rather modern apocalypse. and the dude protagonist traveled with this… girl… woman?? girl??? can’t remember, probably girl, but I was 15-16, she was around my age at least, so I had a crush on her.
and I don’t actually think I’d written a girl protagonist before (not one who wasn’t a chao, or a literal clone of the male protagonist, or both). but something in me said that Rapture would be more interesting if I added a Donnie.
it was.
the thing. the conclusion. the thing is.
that act 1 is great because it exists, against all odds.
it kept impressing me, because I didn’t really think I had it in me to come up with, let alone sustain, a story of this sort.
even back in 2011, I would finish a log then look over it and feel like I didn’t even write the damn thing, like I’m just reading it along with everyone else.
y'know what my biggest claim to fame was, at 16 years old?
it was Dark Chao Adventures. 400,000 words of niche fucking Sonic fanfic that wasn’t about Sonic, and kept inventing its own format because I wrote it from age 10, and which I primarily wrote without an audience yet remembering the time I was 12 and somehow did have a fanbase of other 12-year-olds on the internet.
a story that, I assert, only got better when all the fans moved on with their lives and I was just writing for myself.
this is to say.
I had a weird relationship with writing. (and I had a weird relationship with writing even before that! but that’s a different tangent.)
I knew I could do…. something? but my guess was as good as anyone else’s when it came to what the finished product would look like.
Act 1 is the finished product. but it’s also, like, the beginning of a long story.
Act 1 is where you get to see the story in the active process of finalizing itself.
Act 1 is where the very concept of a self-insert is the subject that must be resolved before we can move onto later acts.
Act 1… could probably also have been called “Book 1,” all things considered. it is longer than a lot of novels, by itself.
Act 1 will end on July 4th. even if you skip the Disclaimer logs, you’ll want to tune back in for July. I promise.
there’s also been, like. fanart over the years.
how do I delineate what’s fanart and what’s not? well it’s maybe slightly arbitrary. but there were a few people whose art I wanted to include in the story itself, people who I would offer to pay outright if I made any money off of rapture (which, uh. look, man. amazon self-publishing does not pay well, not when you only sell like 30 copies in 10 years). these were, in almost all cases, people who kinda outright refused the pay to begin with. and people who let me message them like, “I think rapture needs a picture of X” and they’d make something marvelous.
so then fanart is. the people who draw of their own accord and post it somewhere publicly where I get to see it by chance.
(and some of the “official” artists started off as fanartists.)
(did this model work for rapture? yeah, wow, it kept me going. would I recommend it for other projects? it’s.. not reliable, and if it were reliable it wouldn’t be fair on the artists. it is not sustainable either. it counts on the free time, passion, and experimentation of kind artists. also, like, I didn’t know what I was doing. my focus was on writing the damn thing, and I got excited when people drew stuff.)
but. anyway. there is fanart.
I have… some of it on this computer. all the rest of it will be on my tumblr, deep in the archives, probably inconsistently tagged.
but here’s. here’s some.
these are pieces by hidden-voice.
harlequin, donnie, jordan.
hidden-voice did also draw some other portraits, but we’ve not met those characters yet.
I would link to a website, or a tumblr, if I could. (I would do the same for all artists, and I link to those whose public contacts I actually have.)
THE EGG DANCE (nes)
THE EGG DANCE (mega drive)
the egg dance, aka “I Split The Atom,” is a part of Summer Sucks by Sunsetters. this passage was kinda written as a separate thing (using arpeggios from Summer Sucks), only to later get worked into the album proper, which we were okay with because Summer Sucks is supposed to serve as a musical adaptation of the broad strokes of Rapture. I won’t get into what, exactly, this part represents, as it takes place much later than we are right now, but the very simple version is, like. this is the apocalypse. this is the bad stuff. this is the idle tempo of the rapture.
there are many versions of the Egg Dance. above are the first two ever made, the NES version and the Sega Mega Drive version. here’s some more.
I Split The Atom
THE EGG DANCE (Website Mix)
first one there is the section as it appears in the album. second one is something of a “final” attempt at the Egg Dance as a standalone piece, and a loopable version that was included on my Website, on the Rapture page (and is now here).
the vibes are the point. there is a sense of spite in this dance, a sense of mockery of the very idea of a dance. this feels something like a villain’s dance. not a Caliborn, who would make a piece of crap song because he hates songs, but an Eggman, who would make a genuinely catchy song because he knows what he’s doing. and because he hates you for liking music.
that all comes to me from this piece. and each version has its slight differences of vibe. but it always put Rapture in my mind.
it is called “Egg Dance” because of Dr. Eggman. but if you want to interpret it in another sense of “egg,” you’re certainly free to.
but I definitely had to make a post about the Egg Dance, because it’s on The Website for a reason. also because I’m always excited when I make some music that actually feels like something.
june 21st. day 2 of the strange short Tally Marks logs.
fun fact: the unfunny jokester voice was, of course, added with the Fifth Draft (which first added Attacheds to the story), and I stuck with it in all later drafts for these logs because. well, it’s kind of heady, not something I’d ever had the opportunity (or, been asked) to explain.
but it’s something like an iteration on totheark. a really dry two-step joke, in some ways– “god, what if we suddenly got totheark responses out of nowhere? god, what if totheark just really wanted to tell some bad jokes?” there is, like, a tiny bit more depth to it than that, having to do with 1) who this jokester voice is, and 2) an engagement with a conflict Rapture is very interested in in the long-term, the conflict of horror and comedy (which are really synonymous) versus drama. this jokester voice is not a terribly deep engagement with that conflict, but it was important to me, when reconsidering this long Internet Fic as a physical object (a Book), to thread in some variations on the theme in places that otherwise were in need of a bit more density. (see: textual spatiality, as opposed to temporality. a joycean concept.)
you can discard the Theory stuff here, it’s fine. it’s all really just about the strange sequence of reactions I wanted the reader to have, including a specific headspace of confusion. act 1 is visceral and rather basic, by choice. the relevance of all the Theory stuff will wait for later.
"wow djay. the rest of act 1 had much less complex rambles to it. what gives." well this ramble is specifically about an element i added years later. if we view the composition of ogtrib in stages then this part pertains to the Middle stages. the Attached stages. the Book stages. 2015 - 2016 i think. i was an adult by then and well into my obsession with reading books and thinking about postmodernism. poststructuralism too.
day 3 of the tally mark logs.
frankly it might benefit the readers if I made it clearer, here, what is happening, plot-wise.
the last thing we saw, jordan was running down an alleyway. then he saw something. and then the journal stopped. now, every day, at the same time every day, jordan writes a tally mark in his journal, and that’s all we get.
I can’t quite remember, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I wrote it this way in 2011 for the purpose of just.. skipping some days. I’m not too happy about the laziness of that, but clearly I wasn’t happy about it even then, because I chose to make up for it by making the Secret Explanation Of This Mystery kinda complicated, actually providing for a lot of plot threads that… arguably last us all the way to the end.
rapture is hard work, and it looks a lot easier to make than it is. and I wanted it to be that way. I wanted to allow for some laziness, but any laziness must be offset by something else requiring more work.
I can attest to this. having written an entirely new act 2 in the course of two months this year, and having begrudgingly started a new act 3, like. it’s kind of a serious pain.
even down to the most basic element, the Single Timestamp Entry. hour:minute, contents of entry in a specific voice.
writing them to a pre-established plot outline is a chore. because I never outline the Single Entries; I need those to be written from the bottom-up to maintain the flow of the character.
writing them from scratch… is a fucking challenge. because then I’m also composing the plot, as this nebulous thing far above me (and far ahead of me), while just focusing on some minute detail, jordan kicking a can down a fucking road or looking at some ducks.
and if you think the writing style makes it easier? …well, perhaps. maybe jordan’s writing style is inherently familiar enough to me that it facilitates the ambitious scope of the project. but it doesn’t just come to me, I promise that. these aren’t real thoughts, because they’re not reactions to real events. it feels more like… acting. it’s alright in short bursts, it’s fun to act for, like, a scene or even thirty. but thirty scenes is barely even one log. and acting and writing it at the same time is, uh, less fun.
rapture is a serious investment of effort and time.
is it worth it?
by itself, I mean, it does become worth it. it is kind of a “sum of its parts” situation, and we’re still getting used to all the parts.
but it’s definitely worth it when I have readers along for the ride.
see you tomorrow. maybe I’ll ramble about the slender man, since there’s apparently some anniversary stuff going on in the slender man mythos.
june 23rd. fourth day of the Tally Mark logs.
last time I said I’d say something about the slender man. now, there’s things I can say and things I can’t yet, because– say it with me now– we’re still Early in the story. but that’s okay. I still think I can say some substantive stuff.
(art by rappu)
the slender man was an Obsession of mine. I got into Marble Hornets just before season 1 ended, around April of 2010, after reading the Something Awful thread first, so my appreciation for the creature has always been rooted in an awareness of it as Something Writers Invented. a Concept. I read Just Another Fool around the same time, and I may have tried reading some other slenderblogs but the blogs simply weren’t captivating me. Marble Hornets did. and likewise, I tried watching some other slendervlogs, I caught up with TribeTwelve, I gave EverymanHYBRID a fair shot, I found some enjoyment in DarkHarvest, I remember liking MLAndersen0, but, again, none of them captivated me quite like Marble Hornets. as the years went by, I tried the Slender games– I do actually have a soft spot for The Arrival, but, like.. I suck at horror games. so, again, Marble Hornets. that was always the one for me.
to me, Marble Hornets excelled not just because it was found footage (and really creative re: production values, and really consistent and minimal re: characters, and had an archival-viewer priority when it came to pacing), but because it didn’t actually take advantage of a lot of the features of the internet, and because it didn’t actually take advantage of the ARG stuff, and– most importantly– it only went as far as the basic Wilful Suspension Of Disbelief all fiction calls for, it did not work hard to be like “NO THE SLENDER MAN IS REAL SO WATCH OUT.” Marble Hornets was just.. a series. even the twitter element got phased out (though not before giving us some iconic gems like “sllee pn.ow”). it was Fiction, it was watercooler fiction like a damn TV show. we all watched it, we all talked about it, but we talked about it like a story.
that was terribly significant for me, more and more as the years went by.
the slender man, as a concept, falls under a type of internet horror that flirts with the intersection of Fiction and Unfiction. Unfiction being, y'know, fiction that seeks the blurriest frame possible, fiction that wants to look real, fiction that is designed to fit into the “plausibly possible,” often posted on social media as if real.
those were fun, they caught on with the internet because they are fun. like, addictively fun. just look at the state of youtube horror now, the mountains of Top 10 Scariest Videos, ghost videos, UFO videos, cryptid videos. it’s not even all found footage. there’s an entire cottage industry of youtube videos that curate Written Word anecdotes from reddit and narrate them in a somber voice, and part of the point is that they are framed as if “this is a true story.”
my point being, like. that trend won out. my mum spends the majority of her days watching these videos, and I’m not joking.
it was fun to blur the lines like that, and slender man media was among the pioneers of it as a movement. I remember, I was there. and we in the Fear Mythos actively discussed this, about how much we wanted to do the same with our stories.
OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING was where I committed to going against it.
even when I, later that year, made my own Slenderblog (Where My Eyes Remain), I deliberately ended it with immersion-breaking End Credits.
(photo mine, from Where My Eyes Remain)
at the time, I was just.. Sorta Uncomfortable with the lines being so blurred.
over the years, I have only become more convinced in this: stories are certainly allowed to blur the lines, but the fact that it is so popular is A Bad Thing.
the world is flooded in conspiracy theories and lies. lies are memetic. lies are fun. lies are a game. and some of the worst conspiracy theories out there were intended, by their creators, as just satirical fiction, but then they got popular among those they were making fun of, and the creators (or someone else) saw fit to monetize that. that is how conspiracy theories spread as radicalization vectors.
even QAnon started out that way. and then the process of its growth was a deliberate inversion of the horror ARG: rather than having players try to uncover the content, players created the content by making predictions of what the next drop would be, and the creators took the most clever and incendiary predictions and made it the content.
the slender man did not cause this. I hold firm that it is the responsibility of those who chose to profit off of lies. but this is precisely why I grew so uncomfortable with the practice of breaking down the barrier between the audience and the fiction.
and Marble Hornets… did not do that. and Marble Hornets managed to be successful despite not doing that.
frankly, many of the great slendervlogs did not do that. every time a slendervlog breaks itself up into, say, Seasons, or has a Credits sequence, this is a good thing.
where am I going with this.
that whole ramble is basically what our album No Entry was about, it’s why the slender man is on the front cover. the slender man is not actually all that important to the narrative of the album, but it is entirely appropriate for it to stand adjacent to the narrative.
(art by wiratomkinder)
but I shouldn’t be talking about No Entry, I should be talking about Rapture.
Rapture was in many ways my tribute to the horror I enjoyed. there’s tributes to the SCP Foundation, to Dogscape, to creepy- and crappy-pasta, to RubyQuest, to Stephen King, not necessarily to Lovecraft but to Metallica’s depiction of Lovecraft, there’s even tribute to the vague vibes of Silent Hill that I had been exposed to growing up while being too scared to play it properly. in coming acts you will see tributes to many more things that unnerved me, such as Metroid Prime 2, obscure point-and-click horror games, even some one-off episodes of the fucking Sopranos that haunted me. the influences are many.
but the most persistent tribute you will find is to the slender man.
I still have my stubborn writerly pride, so I don’t actually want to spell out for you what rapture does with the slender man, or even what it already has done by this point in act 1. I want there to be Slenderfans reading rapture, wondering if they’re recognizing a device correctly, “is that a marble hornets thing?”
the slender man is king of horror here. the slender man permeates all you’ll read. rapture has plans for the slender man.
and rapture, at all times, is definitely fiction.
so the Tally Mark logs are done, and the narrative resumes. we’re now in the next story arc, we’re entering the Exodus arc. this will bring us all the way up to Act 2, the part what I’m all excited for. but there will be moments even in this arc that I’m excited for too!
do I feel like rambling right now. not really. it’s been a toasty warm series of days and I hate it. I could say something about the slender man again, getting into the actual, like, devices and influences. or I could say something about how, like, Rapture may have started out as a story with an “unrealistic” protagonist who seems to make choices that heighten the excitement of the narrative (go walking out into the rabbit holes!), only to then rather swiftly “devolve” into repetitive urges-based “spend days milling about one general area.” that is a contrast I am aware of, and I just want to point out that it isn’t inconsistent, it is characterisation. Jordan acts as the context drives him. but frankly, my readers probably already figured that out and did not observe this as something needing an explanation.
we’re now in a pretty square “mill about a general area” territory. arguably the second major iteration of this theme.
just. pointing that out.
I could also say something about how, like. this arc still adheres to the “roman a clef” nature of Act 1. the goal is to get the hell out of England. the summer of 2011 did have that same goal for me in real life. I didn’t get out until around August in real life and pulled it back to June for Rapture for some reason, but I did write this arc towards the end of July, so it was still appropriate. like the fiction, I fled England without my family, at age sixteen. I still have a tendency to view this action as “running away.” I ran away from home.
the original act 2 was written in my new location. and it didn’t.. work out. actually rather traumatically did not work out. and so the original act 2 got dark, because I was not in the right position to write it. I elected to dump the “roman a clef” consideration for future acts, diverging fictional Jordan’s arc from my own. and the core of what I did in rewriting act 2 this year was commit to that more, remove the roman a clef from act 2 as well. though there’s still elements in there, they are handled much more fictionally now and are no longer jarring in unintended ways.
because, like. while rapture dropped the “roman a clef,” it still engaged with the self-insert as a fictional thing.
act 1 is honestly fine in this regard. act 1 is many many things, all of which are rooted in a transition. metatextually, it’s the transition from a Jordan rooted in real life into a Jordan engaged in the fictional world around him. so it makes sense for its original plot to remain and just receive some polishing, fine-tuning, cleanup. which it did.
I will do another ramble about this sometime early in act 2.
the great internet personality Film Crit Hulk once said, as a piece of critical writing advice,
“DON’T WORK OUT YOUR OWN PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ON THE AUDIENCE’S FIFTEEN BUCKS.”
I can’t actually definitely say I disagree with his point, but it is safe to say I undercut it in the spirit of nuance. and anyway I thought it would be funny to leave this post on that quote.
we’re learning about Fears. well, sorta. we’re not really learning much at all. this is more like a Prelude to learning about Fears. it’s also, like, a prelude to the big Serial coming up.
we all know what a serial is, yes? just, a multi-part story. that’s a serial. technically all of rapture is serialized, and technically there’s already been a few serials we’ve been through, like the Harlequin stuff. in the earlier drafts I did classify many more multi-log sequences as “serials.” but somewhere along the lines I elected to remove that classification– they still function as serials, and internally I consider them serials, but, now officially there’s only like five serials in the story, one per act. for the most part, they are the Finales. (….act 4 might have an additional serial or two, but act 4 is a special case. lots of shit happens in act 4. but that’s months, months away.)
we’re coming up to the first act Finale. it will be a multi-part Serial. it will be Official. we’ve got one more day of “regular” logs, then we enter the serial.
I was a kid who liked TV too. I liked TV shows. my first real writing project, Dark Chao Adventures, had Episodes and Seasons and was a pretend TV thing. I always thought in terms of TV. I was raised by TV writing, maybe even more than video game writing.
so. when I decided the story would have a macro structure of Acts, I also knew I’d have to end each Act with a big Finale, make a big deal out of it.
so it begins. the Act 1 Finale. we have a serial, “Rael’s Exodus,” so named because we’re on the Exodus, a commercial ferry that’s doing the crazy task of sailing across the red-sky Atlantic Ocean. it’s also, like, pretty obviously named as such because this is Jordan’s exodus out of his home country.
I come from a specific kind of background, you see: I grew up with the Oddworld video games, mainly on PlayStation. as such, my subconscious views there to be a dichotomy between the words “odyssey” and “exodus.” an Odyssey is a return, an Exodus is a departure. and this probably does actually track as accurate, but yes I have since become aware of the nuances and specific meanings and histories of those words.
just, that’s the sense that “Exodus” is meant here. it’s not Biblical, it’s just functional. big words as seen by a gamer.
obviously there is some merit to having a multi-day voyage trapped in an enclosed space. I think, if I’d have rewritten this at age 29, I could have really heightened that and made it ridiculously paranoid. but as it stands, we have that idea as written by a 16-year-old. it’ll still have merits.
we are definitely building to something. Thoth is annotating these logs, and he’s clearly building himself up to be able to talk about something. something with weird pronouns. god, wouldn’t it be funny if this something also had blue hair? yeah, that’d be funny. don’t expect that, though. this was some years before that was a stereotype, and it’s not one I would have wanted to write with anyway. if there’s anything like it in rapture, it’s complete coincidence.
just. yeah. pronouns. something. something we have not seen yet.
and we are stuck on a boat for six days. (which, I did do the research at the time, that is a plausible amount of time for such a voyage.)
the last section of this log was entirely rewritten, from the moment Jordan and Donnie step onto American soil. when I began my rewrite of Act 2, I wanted to start with that part. there were two reasons for this.
1) in all the earlier drafts, touchdown in Atlantic City is where we met a major character. for this complete Act 2 overhaul, I wanted to overhaul the characters as well, and the dynamics of the protagonist ‘party.’ so we won’t be meeting This Character for a while yet.
2) I was rewriting a decade-old story at a much different time of my life, with a lot more lessons learned. I knew, even if I successfully put myself in the old-school teenage Rapture headspace, there was going to be discrepancy between the parts that were Overhauled and the parts that were simply Touched Up. I had to allow for that, I had to allow for the possibility of a jarring transition. having this align with a geographical shift.. felt right.
England in this story is how I saw it at age 16, and I’m totally okay with that. but America is a very different “character.” America is where I wanted to go, even then, and frankly I never lost that part of me. America is where I had been brought up to live. and America’s a much bigger place, with.. frankly, much more distinct areas, much more distinct boundaries between town and countryside. (“wait, jordan, I am from England and I can tell the difference between town and countryside,” yeah well what about up north? what about Yorkshire? that’s where my family’s from. it’s not so much that I’m saying the towns look like countrysides, more that the towns are so close together that sometimes a drive between them just feels like a brief trip on a motorway and then you’re back into a town that looks identical. no real transition. and have you also spent half your life in America? there are differences in how everything feels.)
so okay, maybe it’s not so much some brilliant real-life insight I’m bringing to the table here, maybe it’s more of… y'know, those words I love so much: Poetry. Art. Expressionism. Symbolism. maybe these observations say more about Jordan than about England.
but I mean, it’s also not a revelation to point out America is a different scale of country. there’s more room for things to happen. and more media to pull sources from.
the point is. we’re in America now. we’re in Rapture’s America. and the writer at this point is now 29 years old.
you are allowed to feel some serious excitement. ;3
//////
so this whole serial, “Rael’s Exodus,” had a simple enough structure: I gave you a boatful of people to gradually get picked off while the Rake and the Massacrer acted as two small-time distractions until it was time to learn about EAT and Indisen. I think it worked for that, I think any claustrophobic horror story needs the ensemble cast and the misdirection plot. it’s not quite a mystery story, it’s suspense. you can’t really predict how the twists will go, though it is entirely possible to see through the misdirection. the goal here was to feed you information about EAT, even with all the Indisen stuff. the Indisen are an important force too, absolutely, but their explanation won’t come for a long time. (it was also important to introduce you to the Masked Massacrer, and to kill off the fourth and final Rake. this serial was written with functional purposes in mind, and that actually helped the tone. nobody likes to be trapped in an enclosed space with the unspoken Plot making decisions for you.)
the real point here was EAT.
you needed to meet EAT. and EAT needed to meet Jordan.
EAT is… important. of course it was gonna be, as it’s my Fear, EAT is my horror creation. as soon as Rapture introduced the Wooden Girl and opened the door for a Fear narrative, it was only a matter of time before I’d include her too. I’d only created EAT a few months prior by that point, and only included her in one story (Jordan Eats Normally Now, which I was starting to feel limited by), I wanted to show her from more angles, let her grow, and maybe even find a way to make her as frightening as I had always wanted.
as a work of function in this story of moving parts, EAT’s role in Act 1 doubles as the foil for the Harlequin. Act 1 has quite a few Fears in it, but most of them had bit parts (and Thoth as a deuter-narrator); the major Fears were Harly and EAT. these were the Fears that Jordan spent the most time with and had actual back-and-forth conversations with. they are meant to be compared and contrasted. they are both characters.
the Indisen exist to show you EAT’s limits. you won’t exactly understand those limits yet, but you are supposed to know that EAT is being thwarted by something. is it a good thing for us? you can use some reason and figure out what the story has already communicated to you, you will hit a wall of “we simply don’t know that part yet,” but it helps to delineate that wall for yourself.
the Masked Massacrer is. god, it’s weird. no matter how many edits I do, no matter how stupid I think that name is, and no matter how many times I forget what the point of the Massacrer was and assume it’s just a random little human threat, I always… leave it there. because I also always remember how the Massacrer exists to turn a lot of wheels that need turning. the Massacrer keeps a lot of moving parts moving. and I’m talking about large-scale moving parts here! the Masked Massacrer is a tiny little lever that does a lot of things!
that’s all just to say, I keep it there for a reason.
but, it’s an iteration on the classic Slender Man trope of The Proxy. it’s a Proxy for something else. even wears a mask. it’s a Masky. it’s absolutely a Masky. that’s all you gotta know right now.
what else should I say here. I think I’ve covered a lot. I also mentioned some things that I could say a little more about but that I just instead… opened the door for you to interpret. because this ogtrib bonus series is like book club. or also omake, Reala made that comment a while ago, this is like omake.
but tell you what. I’ll do one more paragraph, this time talking about Act 1 as a whole, in retrospect. and then I’ll leave you with some bonus Rapture Art.
you’ve now read the complete Act 1, “The Coming of the Four Rakes.” it lasted from May 23rd until July 4th, making it the Act with the most days in it. but amusingly enough, despite having the most days, at 62,000 words it’s by far the shortest Act. I wrote it over the course of about two months when I was 16, in preparation for the time I would run away from a home I was scared of. I lived in fear a lot back then.
I also wrote it because people were reading it. that’s really big for me. little Jordan had an audience, there were people who cared about him (!!!) and people who just wanted to see what the Fear Mythos could do, and Jordan was in some real sense a spokesperson for the Fear Mythos. the mythos had only started in February/March 2011, so we hadn’t been going for that long, but we had numbers and we had ambition. I was having a little fun writing a Fictional Blog, it was a new style for me, but everyone was doing one of those, and we were doing them after the Slender Man Mythos had already done a literally countless amount of them. there was untapped potential in breaking away from the blog format.
so Rapture was Internet Fiction instead. it was allowed to loom out of our expectations, mine included. the only boundaries were My Abilities and The Website It Was On.
Act 1 represents the earliest stage of all this. my abilities were little tiny baby abilities by that point. and while I go back and forth now on whether the later stages of the story, written when I was 17 and 18, were even all that different from the baby-ness of Act 1 (just with different tools), I can’t deny that the creative spark I followed was in fact leading me to a story the world needed to see. (the fact that I have been so isolated that I have not been able to show the world this story, well, that’s just circumstance. once it’s out there, Rapture’s here forever. it will be read. it’s only a matter of time.)
there were serious ambitions. even in Act 1.
Rapture was the story that made me believe in it as I wrote it. and god, do I believe in it now.
/////////
here’s that art I promised.
This is my digitization (and coloring) of one of Rappu’s final sketches done for Rapture. It’s Salmacis/EAT, with a bunch of Camper. I don’t think I ever actually showed this one, not even the original sketch, on this tumblr.
Of course, there is no One Big Lady that controls all the Camper. That’s Rappu’s artistic license, it’s symbolic.
But, look at that thing. You’re with me on this, right? That’s a beautiful picture.
This is a good note to end Act 1 on.
This one’s been a long time coming. It depicts a scene from a little later in the act, from a log that will be titled “The God Machine.” That thing up there is the God Machine.
This piece originated back in, like, at least 2016, when I was compiling the Fifth Draft, aka the First Edition, the physical (and now obsolete) book that contained the first three acts. I had asked Reala to depict this same scene, albeit in an earlier form. She began the piece back then but was never able to finish it.
Left: The earliest version, a sketch. Right: An incomplete render of a digitization.
This year, 2024, when I decided I was going to rewrite Act 2 entirely, I noted we still had no Act Poster for it, and Reala and I began talks of finishing the God Machine piece. I proposed that, rather than try and pick back up a decade-old piece, she try drawing it again from scratch. To aid this purpose, I purchased a drawing tablet myself and whipped up a sketch that basically “rotated the camera,” and also added Donnie.
Left: The sketch itself. Right: With some notes, and an attempt to figure out where the text could go.
Reala was able to do the piece with the aid of my sketch, and throughout June we had regular discussions about the progress of the piece, interpretations of its composition and of its context as the second Act Poster, and I also did some tweaks to the final version myself to allow Reala to focus on other tasks.
Here is the final version again, this time the “color” version, without text:
I, for what it’s worth, am extremely happy with this. It is distinct from the other Act Posters by virtue of being digital art, fluid figures drawn with small textured brushes. If you zoom in on the strokes, you will see textures on a sort of micro-scale. These textures manifest themselves on a much larger scale in the God Machine itself, which has large sketchy textures.
We wanted this to stand as a meaningful piece of digital art. It serves its function in the story– you can easily skim your eyes over it and go back to reading. But if you decide to look more closely at it, you will find elements that are not realistic, are in fact expressionist, things for you to latch onto and interpret. I will not go into the intended meanings of these in this post, as we’ve only just begun the distribution of Act 2.
The poster for the first Act communicated a lot that reflected the tone of that Act. I think this poster communicates a lot too. I hope it feels like Rapture is new again. I hope it feels like we are young and tasked with solving a hard problem.
What are the Seven Ciphers?
See you. :)
In the July 5th log, in a strange sequence, Jordan finds a piece of paper in the woods. He can’t read it at the moment, but Thoth transcribes the paper for us, and we see it is the above lyrics.
They come from a Sunsetters song!
No Entry came out last year, and it was our Slender Man album. This song in particular, “Being Watched,” tells of the protagonist’s solitude in the woods, where he meets a strange figure. The song was started by Lindsay, they sent me the first minute or so in an earlier form and said I could do what I wanted with it. I vibed with it a bit, the scale, the chords, the tempo, the pretty synth, and I saw it as like… David Lynch doom metal. And that’s the direction I took it.
It appears here for.. a few reasons. Jordan is absolutely a fan of the Sunsetters, and in his universe they’re an actual band and their music uses real instruments. So when you listen to this adorable midi doom metal, I want you to imagine what it’d sound like with a real rock band. That’s the fun of Sunsetters, that’s the imagination.
Anyway, here’s the full lyrics.
June 19th:
In the woods there is peace.
And the birds,
And the woodland animals!
On the trail,
On my way out from you.
And the wind,
And the rustling trees hear me.
Peace…
Alone…
June 21st:
In the woods
All the birds have left
because the wind stopped.
A voice speaks to me:
“Do you want to see?”
Watch out for that last part, “A voice speaks to me / Do you want to see?” As we go on with Rapture, just, watch out for it.
today’s log is a big one. there’s some very important scenes going on, in between stuff that is meant to be somewhat confusing.
this was actually the log, rewriting it back in April (2024), where I kinda stopped, took a look at myself, and asked myself a question: “how much work am I willing to put into this? it would take a lot more effort to do it right. and I could get away with sticking closer to the original text but swapping out some corrected lore.”
it took me several hours to do it the right way, for a single log that was already done. but I did it.
the Confusion stuff needed to be updated to later lore, and Jordan’s reactions to it needed to flow a bit more naturally, that part was okay.
but then there’s Mister Ginger.
Mister Ginger needed a serious overhaul. plays the same role, still gives the kids a dramatic monologue of exposition about the state that America is in, still directs the kids towards the Plot too. but all the previous drafts were based on, y'know, the stuff I wrote when I was 16. the quality was obvious. and I was not gonna be happy with it.
so. Mister Ginger hits different now. I like to think Mister Ginger hits bigger now. I like to think that entire scene is more like… what the original was trying to be, but actually executed, delivered.
and that was, in some ways, the real start of the Act 2 rewrite. that was the moment I sighed deeply and committed to what this new Act 2 was going to be like.
today I’m just saying all that, I’m not going into the specifics. consider this an overture for future rambles. I have a lot to say about Act 2. and I also have a lot to show for it. I want the story to speak for itself for now. let it build.
so today’s log is up. this one’s The God Machine. the first Cipher of the story, although lore-wise it’s number 5 of 7. this log isn’t actually all that different from how it originally was, because I think its vibes were necessary. it’s a wacky adventure, pretty purely. I did rewrite a lot of Jordan’s thought processes, and all the dialogue, but the events are all as they originally were. …well, maybe Cockroach Jesus didn’t push Jordan off the fucking bridge, but that change made sense to me. plus it’s funny. I’m happy with that whole scene.
this log, just. that vibe. it has that vibe. a free-wheeling adventure in a colorful landscape, with strange rules. two teenage kids getting through it by the seat of their pants. it’s arguably the climax, the pinnacle, of Early Rapture. I didn’t believe I was going to be able to match that vibe if I rewrote the log entirely. I think I handled it right.
as you saw, despite being on the Act Poster, the God Machine is really just a one-time thing, it’s a boss battle. there will be more boss battles, with different bosses, but on the Act Poster the God Machine represents the whole idea of the boss fights. I think they’re a central structural element of this. but for what it’s worth, the bosses will get better and better. :) there is at least one that was completely rewritten, and turned into a more complex reference.
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it is here that I want to bring back a ramble I had written earlier, some weeks ago, which I posted but then deleted within an hour. it touched upon the “earliness” of Act 1, but it had much more to do with Act 2, which we hadn’t reached yet. and it makes sense to me to bring it here instead, while we’re still early in Act 2. because this ramble, in some ways, touched upon the Thesis of Act 2. and I want you to be aware of it and consider it as we move forward.
here it is.
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I really ought not to discredit the fact that Plenty Of People actually, like, completely love act 1. even the logs I’m most anxious about, such as “Tropes,” have their fans. like, say, my girlfriend, who had not read Rapture and is following along the daily distribution. she, like me, had spent a lot of her adolescence reading an inordinate amount of Stephen King books, and so the kind of horror that act 1 goes for came across very well to her. it’s chaos, it’s vibes, it’s bloodshed, it’s taboo sides of human nature. I am grateful for that perspective and support.
in my out-of-story posts talking about rapture, I am trying to predict two different perspectives: 1) the fan who is Just Absolutely Into It, and 2) the cynic who wonders if the story will get good. maybe that’s a little annoying of me to try and juggle. and that’s a reason I don’t make more ramble-posts than I currently do. but my bold assertion is that both perspectives will ultimately be satisfied with the story. I am courting both because Rapture is a broad tent. but the people who believe a story needs to “get good…” need to learn that they are only at the college level of Reading, they have not actually finished their quest to Learn To Read. the lowest level of Learning To Read says “a teenager’s internet fic is AWESOME!” the middle level says “a teenager’s internet fic needs work!” and the highest level says “a teenager’s internet fic inherently contains the nuances of literature, by nature of the cumulative effect of the evolution of storytelling, and so it is AWESOME. ‘quality’ is just taste but mapped to a hierarchy; all stories are equally deep.” rapture argues that Proof in its own slow way.
those who are on board with rapture act 1 tend to actually already understand that.
there is something to be said for how this can be interpreted as a generational thing. I am on the younger side of Millennials, but I was raised on the internet, raised by Media, raised by Corporate Franchises and encouraged (by fandom) to seek out non-corporate Individual Art. I always identified more with the children of the internet age, the children who are living guinea pigs for the idea that media can raise us when our parents won’t. not that “Media Raised Me And I Resent It” like, say, Gen X. but “Media Raised Me, And What About It?” this is a mentality growing far more vocal thanks to generations of internet users, and all I ever see from The Cool Voice Of Pop Culture is condemnation of them, whether as a sign that “fandom is fucked,” “gen z is cooked,” or, the ultimate crime, “media is making people so much more Annoying.”
but I am with those kids.
I understand what the fuck it means to be raised by media.
I know that the genie won’t go back in the bottle, and that condemnation is simply an admission of defeat, an assertion that those kids can be counted out. and that does nothing, as they were already counted out.
do you really think that fandom offers a suitable sense of community? in theory it does. but have you seen the internet ever since the 2010s?
to be raised by media is a symptom of isolation. but to be raised by media is itself a kind of isolation that shapes you into someone who knows how to speak as if in a community. it is not a substitute for a community; it is a relative of the community.
to dismiss this, to refuse to engage with it, is in fact to leave yourself behind, to be unprepared for the nuances of the future.
What Is Media, Anthropologically?
rapture is extremely interested in that question. because I am, and even at age 16 was, extremely interested in that question. and even Act 1 engages with the question.
it is relatively safe for me to bring this up because rapture will not explicitly bring it up. but, by virtue of being authored by A Particular Human, rapture is about that.
Can Media Have Objective Quality?
is a teenager’s Internet Fic inherently not worth your time? or are you giving over to impatience because of the bias of discomfort, just like anyone would who thinks your favorites are boring?
is sonic 06 even a bad video game? is ocarina of time even a good one?
are these questions asinine manifestations of preference? or does every question translate a deeper network of meaning into the comfortable language of Engagement Of The Adequately Socialized?
thank you for your time.
Fears. there are many. you won’t believe how many. Act 2 introduces to the ensemble of villains, though whether it truly introduces us to all of them is something you’ll just have to wait and see. ………no, the answer is no, it introduces us to less than half of them. rapture’s a big story, you know that by now. there’s a lot of villains, they’re not all Fears.
they won’t all receive Art, though yes that would have been cool. some of them are like the Ruin (rapture’s take on The Cold Boy), who didn’t have much of a role in the original story but is at least getting a second try now. and some of them are like the Ecclesiarchway (y'know, the Archangel), who had a big role but only got, like, the one piece of rapture art. that art went to the July 8th log, if you’ll recall.
Fears are cool, though. if you’re reading this and you have no idea what I’m talking about, because the Fear Mythos is not actually the widespread corner of pop culture I think it is, then explaining them isn’t gonna be hard.
you know the slender man. I did a whole ramble about him as an example of Internet Fiction on June 23rd. he was a collective writing project. some people made Images about him, some people wrote stories (Blogs) about him, some people made videos (Vlogs) about him.
well, in 2011 some other people wanted to do that but with more monsters. the blog format was good enough to warrant some more damn subject matter. and those “more monsters” were the Fears.
there were too many Fears to list here. in Rapture I tried to incorporate all of them, up to a point. eventually I did stop incorporating the new ones, though in the Final Draft I threw in more references…. dammit it doesn’t matter.
the point is horror monsters. Rapture is fundamentally informed by an awareness of blog fiction, which usually is in the genre of lite cosmic horror.
there, now you know what the Fears are. and EAT was a Fear I made. good, we’re on the same page.
and clearly, if we lived in a world where all the cryptids were real and talked to each other, and then the sky turned red and all hell broke loose, then we would expect to see days like today, where the Fears just leap on whole crowds of people and try to cause some carnage.
you gotta understand.
the Fears are from a genre that is entirely horror, all the way through. and I am not someone who holds horror as sacred.
so in Rapture I wanted the Fears to be vulnerable, emotional, petty panicking people. I wanted the Fears to get talked back to, and for them to just have to take that. I wanted the Fears to make mistakes, funny mistakes, and compelling mistakes.
I wanted a story that could go beyond found-footage lite-cosmic-horror. hell, I wanted to show, or remind, Internet Horror writers that there are in fact ways to write something scary that require not sticking to any one genre.
what kind of scary is Giygas? can we honestly call Earthbound a horror story? no, dammit. Earthbound is 100% not horror. it’s closest in genre to a road novel, actually. its focus is the vibes of a world that you choose to find connection in. if you allow yourself to get compelled, then it will take you on a rollercoaster that no video game had heretofore prepared you for. the comedy comes from specific places, and your worry for the well-being of characters comes from specific places too. the horror almost seems camp for most of the experience. it’s only after Stonehenge that the game stops holding up a smile for long enough that you start to reconsider what to expect from the final area.
(and if you have never seen the last stretch of Earthbound before somehow, then. check it out. play it yourself, or find a youtuber who plays it. find a way to sit with it, take in the vibes, the soundtrack. and then get your teeth kicked in, emotionally, by that final boss.)
Earthbound is the kind of thing I think about when I consider the forms of horror that The Horror Genre manages to lack (by virtue of insisting on being a genre). Earthbound changes genre, and it does so after letting you get engaged for a good 30 hours.
it’s not really about the exact length of time, or the proportions of the story. this isn’t a bunch of ingredients in a pot that stir the right way to make the perfect story. it’s entirely about expectation, and the more complicated forms of expectation that come from being committed to a story over a long period of time. making art is like being a magician.
and so, on this subject, I also think of Mother 3. in fact I tend to think of Mother 3 far more often than I ever think about Earthbound. Mother 3 is.. more of a horror story, but it still doesn’t feel like one, because it still isn’t one. Mother 3 is a family drama. it does have a section that goes for a road novel, and it has another section that goes for…. I mean, god, what would you call chapter 7, it’s a change in video game narrative genre and that’s hard to translate into a more broad talk. “adventure.” sure. the scope of the narrative opens up into a broad and serious adventure. but then the scope gradually closes back up afterward, and the story ends on a pure family drama, and it does so famously. Mother 3 is a game of fucking tears, hard tears. it’s literally impossible to play the game and not cry like a baby. no one has done it.
there’s still a lot of fear in all this.
but I think “fear” is a good word here.
there isn’t any horror in these games, but there is fear.
fear can fit into narratives that horror can’t.
and I am much more interested, myself, in fear than in horror.
so it’s not an accident that I’m the one who named us “the Fear Mythos.” once people were calling the monsters “Fears,” I latched onto that word and thought it was enough. I still think it’s enough. when I’m rewriting Rapture, when I’m working on Rapture, I’m doing so with pride in this being a Fear story, and I’m doing so with the commitment to make this story worthy of what that word means to me.
fear, not necessarily horror.
though Rapture also is not a Mother game. Rapture does have horror in it. it usually doesn’t happen to Jordan himself, but he is the witness of a lot of horror, a lot of fates worse than death, and a lot of intense heartbreaking drama.
just, what I’m saying to you here is Rapture has one foot in horror by necessity, and then its other foot is in my childhood. the things I grew up with. and the things that happened to me as I grew up, the worries I developed, the fears that my brain had to process into mere aversions and.. drama.
Rapture is my drama. that’s its genre. it is not committed to being a comedy, nor a horror, though it has fun playing with both. it is committed to being a drama.
I definitely got off track with this ramble, but I decided instead to talk about other general subjects that a compelled reader would need to pick up on.
today’s log has the Ruin do something notable that was not in any previous draft. it brings on a vision for Jordan, the contents of which are alarming, raise some questions. another genre has been introduced now. this one is the riskiest. you’ll have to wait and see what I’m choosing to do with it. (and I will too.)
I’m gonna leave you with a link to some music.
here’s a youtube playlist. it’s called “rapturework.” it’s what I listened to while I wrote Act 2. I actually made a point not to include prog, and not to include any songs longer than a few minutes (though there’s still a prog song in there, and one or two songs in the 15-minute range, but none of them are what you’d expect).
this playlist may clarify some vibes and influences. and plus you may just be curious about what I consider to be “music to write to.”
alright. I said some words.
forgot to even wrap up the mother 3 section. something about how mother 3 is a consciously Written piece of media. its structure and genres are to be studied. i did study them. mother 3 was made by a storyteller acting as a magician. storytelling is being a magician.
writing Tiresias is weird. it’s quite easy to just write the cool worldbuilding stuff, the mentions of Fears, the significance of the Ciphers, what our kids need to do going forward. I mean it takes a little time to think it through but I’m accustomed to that, and it’s worth it to make this cool book-reading god character. but I don’t actually want the conversations to just be that. as things proceed, jordan has his own preoccupations that he wants to focus on. and that’s the part that’s… weirdly hard to write. they open doors in the narrative, reveal entire new possibilities for where the story can go. and I want to.. keep a balance.
there does need to be new stuff. act 2’s about to go down a road with a lot of new stuff.
but the old stuff doesn’t want to be forgotten either. and in my brain when I write these conversations, I feel all these elements urging me to consider them. all of them.
rapture has a narrative that was already written. that narrative did have some room for new elements.
I have to decide what I’m ultimately committing to– the old stuff or the new stuff. and I have to figure out how to write in order to get there.
so one thing I really like about the July 22 log is that, like. making it was a pain, I was rewriting a log titled “vague” where nothing happens but a lot of angst. I actually ended up rewriting tomorrow’s log as this one, as originally tomorrow was when the kids head into California. but that log was written when I was high as a kite, at age 16. it was in fact the only rapture log ever written on weed, and it’s hilarious how boring it was. drugs don’t make you more exciting, kids! and they don’t help your creativity. your creativity was already in you, and sometimes drugs offer a change in habit that is what you needed, but the actual chemical changes themselves are really bad for creation.
anyway. so the material I was working with was Like Nothing. and making this log was a trudge for me as a result.
but somehow. like. it ended up really good. a good quiet Travel episode. it contributes a lot to vibes and character, and it does give us some hints of lore that I get to expand on a bit later.
so. I am happy with this log for being a very cohesive and functional Small Log, and a remarkable point of contrast to show my evolution as a writer. the same plot, “just travel,” but in Act 1? would be a lot shorter. and emptier.
let’s talk about today’s log.
first, the shopping mall and the mannequins. this was a puzzle for me, as this was entirely new content, an entirely new rabbit hole that’s at least based on tropes that some other rabbit holes in the story had exhibited. had to figure out a plot, a reason for this part of the story, didn’t want the kids to just happily find a door and resume the America trek without some effort. there’s some small details that may come up again. and then there’s the mannequins. honestly that idea is well within the boundaries of what existing horror stories already do, it’s nothing special, but, like, I want to emphasize here that writing rapture often means having to compose a fully functional short story that’d be perfectly good on its own, but having it condensed within one section of a single damn log. the mannequin thing was a case of that. felt as much of a pain to make as if I had written it as a whole story.
second, Salmacis.
what do you want me to say.
I love EAT. I love Salmacis, as one particular story’s portrayal of EAT. Salmacis is like an EAT that is willing to be a Good Guy.
today Salmacis shows up as a girl in plaid who’s absolutely caked in mud. what’s not to love?
(I actually do have some trouble with EAT conversations, despite them flowing so naturally for me. because I end up writing a lot of variations on the conversation, sometimes completely new extended conversations, and having to rigorously delete what I can and manage the flow. these conversations have to flow as believable conversations, yes, but they also have to flow as part of the greater Rapture experience, feeding into a sequence of Information and Speculation to be experienced by the reader.
(Salmacis is a character who knows a lot more Information and has more reasonable Speculation than almost any other. I don’t want her to just walk us all the way through the plot, though. so I give her limits.)
third, San Francisco. or Sanctuary Francisco (San. Francisco).
in the original story, we didn’t get there until tomorrow. but I had to shuffle some plot around anyway, and I was okay with getting us there today, introducing us to this local RAF group early.
San Francisco is a five-log serial. it is not a finale, though, so it’ll be treated as just another five logs, but, it’s clearly all a sequence.
the original serial was comically boring. there were reasons for this, but yes you are allowed to summarize them as “DJay was 16.”
I have Done Things with it this time.
it gave me a lot of trouble to do so, but I believe it was worth it.
I will have a lot of things I can ramble about for the next five logs.
you know what I said earlier, about rapture requiring me to come up with entire short stories’ worth of ideas and condense them all into little sections of a log?
San Francisco was that but bigger.
San Francisco, in this rewrite, was me coming up with an entire five-act play. each log is an act in this play.
it would have been a compelling and wild play on its own.
but instead it’s just A Plotline in OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING.
and we’re about to enter it.
there are ways we can connect this to the Big Ramble I did at the start of the act, the thesis of Act 2, something about what media is and how storytelling evolves, builds on itself.
that’s for you to ponder on. put on a beret and stroke your chin and think about it. even if you just pretend you “get” it and start saying stuff about it that sounds like what someone who “gets it” would say, I promise you will be unironically engaging with it appropriately. we misunderstand “getting it.” art is engaged with far more successfully by playing pretend, as long as it’s done in good faith.
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there’s a talk about the nintendo DS in this log. I had actually decided on a big thing here, and had written it into the log before deciding to scrap that and leave it completely unspoken. or, actually the kids probably absolutely do speak to each other about it, but Jordan deliberately doesn’t write about it, because he has no real reason to.
that is: in my personal headcanon, at least, Jordan has been carrying, with him, his Nintendo DS in a pocket this entire time. it’s very old, has no battery cover, the battery is held in there with a big old strip of tape. it only has one game in it, probably Sonic Rush, and he doesn’t really play it because he’d already beaten it before all this. but he keeps the DS with him because it can tell the time. and he uses the DS to tell the time, when he’s not in a city or something where he can just see the time on some abandoned clock. he especially uses the DS in the rabbit holes, where the time doesn’t really matter and definitely wouldn’t be adhering to the time zone of wherever on Earth Jordan just was. the DS would be still in that time zone, though.
Jordan does not check his DS every timestamp. I fully believe that a lot of the time he doesn’t actually give us the correct time, that he just gives a reasonable educated guess. but he’ll check his DS every now and then. definitely when he wakes up.
there will be some rabbit holes like those hotels where he can probably plug it in and charge it too.
like. this is entirely within Jordan’s character to do. he hates watches and does not have a phone. this is a perfectly goofy explanation.
in this log, at that party in San Francisco, at the gamer corner, he will have pulled out his DS and talked about video games with others. I think I remember something about someone else having a fucking Atari Lynx, and Jordan not even knowing that was a thing. maybe that exchange happens tomorrow. maybe not, I think it was tied to the reveal of Jordan having a DS on him.
but I felt it more important to cut that reveal, because Rapture otherwise never offers an explanation for Jordan’s sense of time, and I actually prefer it that way. the presence of timestamps is fairly reliable and serves as structure, backdrop, the “frame,” the “stage” on which what we see unfolds. I didn’t want to actually call attention to it, even for an appropriately goofy explanation. I could have. I am not above calling attention to structural elements. but I believe it would make the story more confusing where it doesn’t need to be– those sections where the time is unknown, where the timestamp is “Night” or a string of numbers. I didn’t want the reader wondering about how that fits into the fucking Nintendo DS thing. I want those sections to just clearly indicate disorientation, be off-putting rather than confusing.
but. let it be a headcanon. let this be Word Of God offering an amusing proposition.
Jordan is absolutely a DS boy.
today’s log makes mention of a song called “Solitude.” in the context of the moment, it is really awkward that this song starts playing.
I want you to feel the awkwardness.
so here’s the song.
I fucking love this song.
(and funny story, I was just… writing that scene… and then this song just came on. and I was like. “okay this is too perfect. I can even spin this as plausible.”)
I know for a fact this July 26 log took me some serious effort. I was never gonna be able to make it at all if I hadn’t been working on Rapture several hours a day for a month prior. I was back in my element here, and I wanted to make the story as good as 16-year-old me wanted it to be. I think this log took me 12 consecutive hours of concentration, I think I remember that it was a really long day, and I had already done some work on it the day prior.
in this San Francisco serial, I was acting much more as a “director,” having to arrange and consider scenes, many scenes. each log was an Act in a 5-act play, and this one, as “Act 3,” actually stands as a microcosm; this log itself can be split into five acts. that was a conscious decision. and it’s entirely possible, in fact most likely, that the reader won’t notice it. the invisible divisions drive the reader’s experience without being seen. this, in practice, is actually less like a play and more like a TV show. did you know that a lot of drama TV shows consider each episode to have 5 acts? they’re usually where the commercial breaks go, the cut to black. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul both adhere to that. Mad Men does too, I’m.. pretty sure. which, if true, would mean the Sopranos does too.
today’s log is like an episode. hell, it has the drama and chaos of a season finale, but we’re only in the middle.
I actually had written this log to be even longer than it ended up being. I had written longer talks with Salmacis, talking about other Fears in detail, and elected to cut them for flow. I still have those conversations saved, so I would like to bring them back later.
today Jordan and Salmacis mention a song, “The Fountain of Salmacis.” this is a song by Genesis, from 1971, and it is in fact where I got the name “Salmacis” from. my use of the name is not classical but prog.
it is a really good song. sounds nothing like rock music generally sounds like, especially not back then. really theatrical, dark, magical, and virtuostic. Genesis are a band of wonders. seriously. can’t recommend them enough.
the end of San Francisco, a rapture log play in five acts.
july 24th, act 1, was 3,000 words.
july 25th, act 2, was 2,500 words.
july 26th, act 3, was 8,800 words.
july 27th, act 4, was 6,100 words.
july 28th, act 5, was 4,700 words.
the total is 25,100 words. for one serial in the greater story’s act 2. this was over a third of the length of act 1 as a whole. and also like half of a nanowrimo? but I wrote San Francisco over the course of… about a week, back in late April or early May. I’m still not ready to tell you the word count for act 2 as a whole.
they’re big numbers, these word counts. but now that you’ve actually read some Long Logs, you might have an idea of why I don’t want to give the big numbers until you’re done! these logs are actually pretty damn engaging! to know ahead of time how long it is would be discouragement, or even a real risk of discouragement. and I want readers. :( (plus, how do you think I feel? having to write the damn stuff! when I saw the total word count for act 2, that actually just made it way harder to start act 3. I gotta keep reminding myself that short logs are okay!)
…so.
so San Francisco.
if you were to go back and read the earlier drafts of this serial, the difference is stark. a couple of elements are the same: Jordan and Donnie have a disagreement, they’re staying with these RAF folks (with the same names), on day 4 they burn down the Golden Gate Bridge as things go bad, and on day 5 the Judge takes the city. but the old serial was…. oh my god so empty. so short.
there’s a reason for this. I mean, yes, I wrote it when I was 16 years old, but I had already demonstrated I was interested in challenging myself, taking the time to make plots more elaborate. but the problem was this was November 2011, and I was going through hell. I had run away from home, given a plane ticket to go back to America, was staying in a house where I wasn’t really.. wanted! had gotten myself back into high school, entirely of my own accord. was sleeping in the damn living room for months in a house of 10 residents, with my brother as landlord. my brother may have been able to stick up for me more, but he had jobs keeping him out of the house. so I had to deal with the catty underhanded group dynamics myself, when I was home from school; I had no bedroom to retreat to. even though this literally was the house I had grown up in, now deteriorating with garbage and poor upkeep by all these residents. and anyway, then, in November, one last resident had a beef with me. it wasn’t because of anything I had done. it was just vibes. he was like that. and he had guns, and he had crude sensibilities, and he liked to think of himself as a drill instructor, and.
god I really hated that guy. >_<
he was the basis for the Cody character. though Cody is much less of an asshole. the real guy wouldn’t have ever given me a chance to explain myself, wouldn’t have disarmed himself, wouldn’t have stopped until I was gone. because he didn’t! I left. I went home. not immediately, and not directly because of him, but. it was bad news after bad news, okay, and all things being equal I might have been able to face it all, staying in America was what I was made for… but I was already damaged goods. I didn’t have it in me anymore.
and. yeah. I also didn’t have it in me to give rapture the treatment it deserved.
so. fast forward to 2024, and I’m already rewriting act 2, and I get to San Francisco and feel this immense… shame inside me. I did not like to revisit that serial, because of the time of my life that it represented, and when I did revisit it there was nothing fucking there.
so I knew I had to rewrite it better.
apparently I took that real seriously.
I think San Francisco is one of the best parts of the story now and can only hope I can match it later on.
but, like. one of the things I did in rewriting San Francisco was fictionalize the Cody character more. by fleshing him out, basing him off of more influences (such as Alex Kralie!), giving him more time to speak and show his own nuances, I was able to… if not “put some closure on the past,” then at least disentangle some memories and separate the past from this story of mine that means… so much…
yeah. writing the new San Fran was therapeutic. and it produced a really cool piece of fiction. a tale of humanity, another look at our gods. another chance for EAT to speak.
yeah.
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music pieces referenced in log 5, “Synecdoche.”
first is “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” by Henry Purcell. the actual original piece is somewhat obscure, but depending on what media you grew up with, as soon as you hear the horns come in you’ll know exactly how it goes.
what a fucking piece. brilliant chord progressions. gives me chills.
as Jordan mentioned in the log, he had heard the song through much more modern contexts.
Kubrick nuts, and also all you trans girls out there, will be much more familiar with Wendy Carlos’s rendition of the piece, as used in the opening to A Clockwork Orange.
but then I, me, DJay and Jordan, I did not grow up with this. (I didn’t watch A Clockwork Orange until I was about 14 or 15, and I really wasn’t much of a film appreciator then. the film bored me, except when it wigged me out.)
I grew up with Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
honestly, if you haven’t ever seen this game, I’ve gotta recommend it. seeing it. not really playing it. it is the one and only Rare game I grew up with, and was probably the N64 game that my brothers and I played the most. I was watching this game when I was 9 years old. (I have since gone on to beat it myself. it’s a journey, for sure! but brutally hard at random times.)
it’s actually almost definitely a big influence on me. when I stop and think, “hey, actually, Conker was a long unbroken journey filled with pastiches taken weirdly seriously, featuring a guy who’s too tired to really object to the ridiculousness around him,” I.. yeah, that definitely had a hand in shaping me as a storyteller. plus, “Nintendo with adult themes” means everything to me. “a game that should not exist” means everything to me. and frankly it is a way more clever video game than it had any right to be.
but. anyway. Conker begins with a pastiche of the opening to A Clockwork Orange. and I will have seen that cutscene a thousand times– and yet I never got tired of it.
the song especially makes it so rewatchable. such class. god, what a song.
…..right, anyway.
the other song referenced in the log is:
the thing is, there is no way Jordan would have known the name of this piece, nor the name of the person who wrote it. by all accounts, he would have just been like “oh yeah, it’s That song.” and I would have written it that way, but.
there’s just no way to fucking casually refer to this song using words. there are, I mean, there are ways to, but those ways would also refer to many other pieces of classical music.
so I took some artistic license. hell, maybe the Legstep first played an audio file of some deep-voice man saying “Good morning. We’ll start off this beautiful morning with a classic. This is Edvard Grieg, Morgenstimmung.” and so maybe Jordan’s words are a shortening of that. that’s plausible.
but the point was, Jordan woke up in this gorgeous natural rabbit hole hearing one very specific song. you know the song. I promise you, you do, with 100% certainty.
yeah, you know the one.
I dunno, I thought this was somewhat funny.
it’s also a dividing line. before this point, we were still in the San Francisco serial, albeit in a sort of coda to it. after sleeping, we’re waking up to some new plotline. a new A-plot.
and that A-plot begins with this song.
/////////////
if you’re wondering what “synecdoche” is, or “sin-ECK-duh-key,” you can google it. or I guess I could just tell you.
it’s a specific rhetorical device, one you’ll also be familiar with, if not the word for it.
it’s the use of a Piece in substitution for the Whole.
or vice versa, the use of a Whole in substitution for a Piece!
the example I usually know it by is, like. newspaper articles saying “the White House responded to the news…”
where “the White House” is used as a Whole, substituting for the Piece (the White House’s press response team!).
or “Hollywood won’t like that…” using “Hollywood” to refer to some specific people within Hollywood.
or, how about, "Houston, we have a problem!" the astronauts weren't talking to the city of Houston but to the specific Houston-based mission control.
that’s synecdoche! it’s rhetoric. it’s used in journalism and poetry alike.
this log is titled synecdoche for… some reasons. admittedly I don’t entirely remember them all. but the obvious one is the court of the Judge, where he makes his sentence by synecdoche, assigning the same sentence to the individual as to the whole city. it’s not fair for making sentences. but the Judge probably isn’t all that fair, is he?
got asked a question about the july 28th log.
Dr0Shadow 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 — Today at 3:42 PM
@DJay did you just throw Elon Musk into the rapture and reference those dumb cars tesla made like a decade before they wouldve been invented
DJay — Today at 5:02 PM
it was definitely a nod to the real-life present day. there are some of those in the final draft.
but elon musk was already CEO of Tesla, he became CEO in 2004.
the log sorta implies that the Judge chose him sorta arbitrarily– as he puts it, he’s not even from San Francisco. I imagine he wasn’t in it at the time and was just, like, whisked away to that court scene.
so in some ways it’s a demonstration of a “greater” logic being used by Xanadu’s judgement (with the Judge as the vessel of that)
that greater logic being something like… “this is a name more people in the world will know (even in 2011).”
but the Attached for that log more overtly draws attention to real-life shit. the Attached makes a pretty obvious allusion in “tweet tweet” and “Now I’m for the birds.”
though it’s still “ambiguous” enough that one can instead read a non-twitter interpretation out of it. poetry, and all.
I seem to have landed on the font for that Attached being Georgia (for the website, and “Chat”/courier new for tumblr), which is the Tiresias/Thoth font.
though there exist other Attacheds in a specific other font that are exclusively written by real-life author me, and I could have used that for this.
I think, if I had used real-life-author-me font for that Attached, then we could just call this a cute anachronism.
but I didn’t want to do that. and I didn’t do that.
I elected more for Poetry.
what does it really mean??? I dunno. sincerely.
it’s the kind of thing that, if I sat down and really concentrated, and rambled at you for an hour, I could reason out a convincing interpretation.
and if I had to guess, like. the short answer is, like with the Fears themselves, “it’s more about this deeper pattern that real-life Elon Musk is just one iteration of.”
“Elon Musk is one frond on a big hyperdimensional plant. Rapture depicts other fronds of it and shows how they connect to the Elon Musk frond, and Rapture tries to imply the deeper stem.”
but. but yeah. the surface intent is “what if elon musk gets trapped in a car and thrown off a cliff. what if the fictional world gives justice for something that happened in a different world.”
the surface intent is for you to get a good chuckle out of it.
rapture actually has a fair few instances of…….. Real-Life Bad People in completely different contexts.
like there’s Attacheds, including ones we haven’t gotten to yet, saying that, like, “comcast really stepped up when the apocalypse came; they provided free internet for everyone and worked overtime, volunteered, to keep the servers running” and “Rupert Murdoch had a change of heart, seeing the planet collapse. he saved a fucking bus of orphans. and gave his newspaper offices to be used by squatters, pro bono.”
in those cases they’re more like really dry black comedy.
the joke is they would never do that. and, if they ever read rapture themselves, they’d be struck with a window into a world where they actually did something people liked.
elon musk could have gotten something like that.
but I elected to not even give him the chance.
maybe we can read this as a Dante kinda thing. how Dante wrote real-life people into his Comedy. how he handled the bad people.
and rapture has been compared to the Comedy before, by people who are not me!
it has never been my desire to make rapture into the Comedy. even after I read and learned to appreciate the Comedy. I deeply admire the thing, and I take inspiration from it in some broad ways.
but I am willing to have moments in rapture that give you, like, a window into a world where rapture was like a different book.
that works really well with rapture as a whole. gels well with it.
lots of windows into other worlds.
in some ways rapture is a hell of a lot like rick and morty.
and that wasn’t intentional either!
but it’s honestly one of the closest analogues I can think of. and I’ve tried.
so, let’s talk about the seventh cipher.
in earlier drafts, this was The Easy Final Level of the Realm King, a much simpler trek through a snowy environment. there were 8 challenges, ranging from “eat a pot noodle” to “play this song on the clarinet,” a silly variety of challenges that fit more in line with cipher 6. and there were 5 mini-fights, mainly being the four bikers. a lot of that log was just Having To Walk Big Distances, and so it stretched across two logs. the final boss, on July 31, was just… The Realm King, a big blue guy who sat on a throne and was defended by waves of golden knights. again, more in keeping with cipher 6.
it was like this because I was still not in the right place to write Rapture. I had just returned home to England, in December 2011, returned back to my parents after trying to run away, after that blew up in my face. I came to Rapture because it kept me busy. and while this was at least more creative than the original San Francisco, it was absolutely anticlimactic. and I did at least turn that into a strength: I played on this being an easy final level, a real type of video game trope that usually is not intentional. I played on the strangeness of this for the protagonists, and I turned it into characterisation for this big mythical “Rapture” itself: Rapture gave us an easy final level because Rapture wants these ciphers done.
admittedly I am not unhappy with that idea. (it’s in keeping with MOTHER 3, in fact. a lot of the interesting ways Rapture plays with video game expectations pretty much comes from MOTHER 3– when it doesn’t come from secretcity. seriously, oh my god play MOTHER 3. it is so worth it. one of the greatest video games ever made.)
but this isn’t 2011 anymore. this is 2024. this is Rapture’s eighth draft. this is a new Act 2, this is DJay writing at age 29, showing what he– I– can do. since early in the rewrite process, a theme has been emerging: “I have to do it right this time, I have to put the work in and make a long story much denser.”
while I had forgotten about just how empty San Francisco was, I was very conscious of the seventh cipher and the opportunity it presented. to write a new cipher log… god, I’ve been dreaming of that all throughout my most unproductive years.
so.
I did the work. I put the work in. I took a few days to write this. I think I did two days per log? my first day was pure planning. my first day was this: (click to enlarge)
I planned out the level, making a map. had to stretch it across two sets of pages, but here I’ve arranged it so it lines up.
in the July 30th log, we start at the very top-right. we see the destination across the sea of lava, and have to travel our way around the bay and round up to the castle. the july 31st log takes place entirely in the castle on the top page.
a lot of this came rather naturally, as I was inspired by the map design of Elden Ring, how progression feels so driven by the arc of the coastline even when you’re exploring these landmasses atop massive cliffs. and I was especially inspired by the layout of Castle Stormveil, which is incredibly imposing on the outside but quite based on a realistic castle inside. all I really had to do was draw a coastline and find the best place to put a defendable castle; the rest came from that.
then I just had to write it.
I was keeping the 8 challenges and the 5 fights. I was keeping the general snow-kingdom aesthetic. making the challenges and fights more cohesive was a matter of finding a unifying Scheme, and for that I chose to base them on Buddhist concepts. the 8 challenges loosely represent the Noble Eightfold Path, and the 5 fights are based on the Five Hindrances. the hardest part here was writing Jordan and Donnie’s little Socratic reasonings for the eightfold riddles, though once they enter the castle the riddles are replaced with direct and immediate challenges of staying mindful in an atmosphere of extreme horror, repulsion, and despair.
I quite enjoyed fleshing out the lore here, giving the kingdom its own implied backstory, the tale of a world that could not defend against the Rapture. but of course, the Rapture is different for every world, so we can’t even use this world to predict what our Rapture will be.
one of the most important steps in all of this planning turned out to be the simplest. I didn’t want this guy to be called “the Realm King” this time. I was prepared to spend a while coming up with a whole new name, but naturally my first instinct was to flip the name around. King Realm? ….King Real?
it’s a simple name. almost feels trite, something out of a fairy tale. but something about it cut right through my core and spoke to something I wanted to bring out of Rapture this time around. I don’t see it as a fairy tale name. I see it as intimidating and holy. this story has something to do with the many different “realities,” the relativity of “real.” a King gets to enforce a reality on his kingdom. a King enforces it because a King believes in it, that is an important part of how power works on those within the system.
this King Real is not a bad guy. in fact, we end up feeling a lot of sympathy for him and his people.
but Rapture is not a story where the good guys are named The Good Guys and the bad guys are named The Bad Guys. Rapture is a moral tale, maybe even moralist, but it’s excruciatingly modern. it’s maybe the “tale” part that’s most modern. Rapture is a modern kind of tale. or, really it’s ancient. it’s an epic. but it’s an epic translated into modern techniques. a post-Ulysses epic that is not waiting for readers to catch up with what that means.
so. he’s called King Real because he was named by a tradition that is not our tradition. if it sounds like a fairy tale name to us, we’re still struggling to understand the implications of relativity.
….it’s hard to put all this into words right now. but I felt it all in me when I saw the name “King Real.”
I wrote the July 31st log while listening to music from the DOOM 2016 soundtrack on repeat. that also feels important.
Doom is embedded in my subconscious by now. the original Doom, and the existence of the franchise. this is.. admittedly a really rich subject, ripe for rambles that directly connect to Rapture. just, we absolutely would not have Rapture without Doom. I think even the naming conventions are relevant here. my story’s full name is OGTRIB, but I refer to it colloquially as “Rapture.” there’s even a section of story, currently nebulous, called “Final Rapture,” which is absolutely a reference to Final Doom.
Rapture and Doom.
it’s no accident. or, at most, it’s a happy accident.
why? what similarities do they have? what is it I got out of the Doom games? other than a love affair with midi rock music and the sensibilities of open source communities. a comfort in first-person video games, a love of mazes. firm confirmation that one must face injustice with the stubbornness of a shotgun.
I dunno. that’s something that’ll take a lifetime of interpretation to work out.
/////////////////////
then there’s the “other half” of this log, really more like the last fifth of it. I will say a lot less about this section, because this is the beginning of something Rapture will take a long time exploring.
the A-plot has moved out of the ciphers and into what comes next.
Guitar Hero is involved now.
and we finally meet Bones… as well as Fentzy and Danny?
in earlier drafts, we actually met Fentzy and Danny way earlier. we met Danny on July 4th, the end of Act 1, and we met Fentzy on July 5th, the start of Act 2.
the decision to move their introduction here, towards the very end of Act 2, was significant. it changed many things about Act 2 and basically facillitated the heavy rewrite to begin with.
we needed more time with just Jordan and Donnie. that was worth it.
but now we have the full party.
who is Fentzy? who is Danny? who is Bones?
how will the kids all get along now?
these are important questions!
i could have said more about the king real stuff. the elden ring influences go further. and the body horror stuff took a lot out of me! but i had to go where my ramble took me. and if you want more answers you'll have to ask me directly. or meditate on it yourself.
god, that’s nostalgia. that’s my nostalgia. I know what other people grew up with, but the things I grew up with, the things that hit me at the right time and made formative memories, I’m still trying to piece all that together because I can’t name them all by heart.
but suddenly, in a conversation with my girlfriend, I recalled Jill’s Song. and I rewatched this. and. this is.. everything to me.
I was 13 when this came out. and I was already a follower of Lit Fuse Films, so I absolutely saw this when it came out, I was definitely 13.
this… incredible standalone scene. professionally cinematic, and that’s no accident, as Zachariah Scott and Robert Stoneman are professional cinematographers for the video game industry, between them making cutscenes and trailers for games, working on things such as Mass Effect 2 and The Witcher 3. but back then, in early 2008, they were still making little arthouse videos in Garry’s Mod.
and Jill’s Song was. different. it hit different. it was low-key. had excellent voice work, and faceposing well beyond what I thought was possible back then. it was instead about the dialogue, the delivery, the oration– and that music. that gorgeous little original piano piece. Jill’s song. and this guy, this Jack, talking about her song.
the writing has a flow to it. it is written to be delivered. I watch this thing and I’m hanging on every word, because of how he’s saying it, and how it matches the music.
this video changed me. it may have been what made me give a shit about movies. I needed to see the magic of movies through video games first, through Half-Life, through Garry’s Mod. because this was something closer to me than Hollywood. this was some guy who likes video games, making a thing for the internet. the 2000s internet, with all its promise.
that spoke to me. “ah, so this is what internet stuff can look like.”
and its content spoke to me too, dug its hooks in me.
I didn’t think of myself as a good writer. I was 13 years old. but this video may have defined good writing to me. and looking at it now, it is clear to me how strongly I took influence from this. how much faith I took in the value of the flow of words, how even a fairly empty sentence can grab the audience because it’s all about the words, and we can make beauty out of emptiness!
that’s! yes!
that’s exactly it, that’s the words!
“we can make beauty out of emptiness!”
that’s what resonated with me. even in other works by Lit Fuse Films, such as the Rusty Whispers series, and Ignis Solus. they’re fundamentally lonely pieces of film, not even made with film, not made with people or the real world, but made entirely within garry’s mod, not even a game but a mod of a game. a mod! the kind of thing that other companies would take down, off the internet forever. a fragile cultural structure. fragile, possibly fleeting– can’t even be sure it’s fleeting, so we’d better make the most of it while we have it. and we made the most of it.
that was the mod culture I was exposed to, growing up.
I can’t even honestly say “we” made the most of it. I was an observer, a lurker, a child. I marvelled over the products of that culture, I grew up with those products.
my life was empty. and these products were empty too, but they were sculpted emptiness. they were a beautiful emptiness. they made me think about, engage with, emptiness.
that’s. that’s art.
(and that’s a thread into many of my art’s riddles too. such as the “importance” of Guitar Hero in Rapture. and my musical creations’ stubborn adherence to the midi format. it’s all forged from my experiences seeing beauty spun out of emptiness.)
so, after all that, after a long month and a lot of effort, we have reached another Finale. the Act 2 Finale, “Don’t Speak Its True Name.”
this turned out to be another, uh… well, I had to completely rewrite it, every bit of it, from scratch. come up with new ideas.
and, being completely frank with you: rewriting this finale was the single hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. it was so hard that, when I finally finished it all up, I just.. metaphorically keeled over and felt intense burnout. I felt the burnout of all of Act 2 catching up with me too, as well as this Finale, which took me more than two solid weeks of long days to pull off.
hell, fun fact for you: I started the rewrite of this part a matter of years ago. this very log, the first like third of today’s log was written like… two years ago, I think? I hit a wall and put it off, and when I came back to Rapture this year I took a look at this log and was like “…..before I can even start with this, I’m gonna need to rewrite all of Act 2.”
and when I finally got here, I still had trouble!
and yet I did do it.
don’t worry. there is a complete End Of Act 2 for you to read.
it is weird and elaborate and long, and I stand by it.
I wrote this serial like I was writing a season of the Sopranos.
that was a conscious thought in my head.
(it’s not gonna be much like that show in content, or even format. the influence is maybe more in spirit. a consecutive episodic narrative with rhythms, anticlimaxes, counterpoints, twists, and riddles.)
that burnout aforementioned, well, I'm still going through it. I do intend on making a ramble about the two strange Musician logs in the middle of the Finale, and for that matter also making the new Act 3 of the damn story, but for now I gotta do other stuff. so I Owe You a ramble.
I will also make a ramble for the main chunk of the Finale, the Ghost stuff, the Genera stuff, the underscore stuff. this ramble will wrap up with a retrospective on Act 2. there's a chance this ramble won't come until we're much further in the story. I'm probably much too close to the Finale right now.
but hey, fun fact for you: the entire "Don't Speak Its True Name" serial clocks in at 31,000 words, bringing the total wordcount of Act 2 to 130,000. I somehow managed to write that in two months, April - May 2024, while maintaining daily distribution on tumblr and on this very Website, and arranging for some more visual art (including drawing some, myself!). frankly, the fact I became burned out afterwards is the most sensible thing.
look at that. you have two whole acts of OGTRIB to explore at your leisure, presented fairly neatly for you here on my Website. I have, in fact, done a lot this year. You're Welcome. :)