The Lost Art of the Internet

Hypnospace Outlaw is one of my favourite games of all time, yet there are aspects of it that I feel aren’t discussed that often. A lot of people talk about its alternate universe look at a Y2K internet, and most also don’t immediately assume it’s making jokes out of it with nothing to say. A fair few people manage to relate it to Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism, as is the video essayist stereotype (said with love). But I feel like most analysis fails to cover it on 2 fronts: as a piece of interactive fiction or “hypertext fiction” design, and as an appreciation of the characters that make up the world it sketches, an appreciation of people making art, messy art, even if they don’t get it. Hopefully I can talk about all of this myself! And, even more hopefully, I can begin to sketch a portrait of a better internet from the things it discusses.

A Brief And Bad History Of Hypertext Fiction

So we’re gonna have to make a brief definition of what hypertext fiction is for the purpose of this essay. Don’t take it as gospel, even within this article! My personal definition, to limit how much research I need to do while still discussing a fair bit of stuff, is the following:

• It’s digital and uses some kind of visual markup language, like HTML, where you can arrange text, images, audio, video, and other interactive elements. It’s also not entirely video/images.
• It’s split into “pages”, and pages link to other pages.
• You can navigate through these pages at your own discretion, in a way that allows you figure out narratives non-linearly.

I think this is reasonably descriptive! Hypnospace Outlaw, while still having an overarching narrative, does have lots of small narratives that can be figured out nonlinearly. A lot of web art ends up being hypertext fiction (which is good, considering HTML is Hypertext Markup Language). Things made in HyperCard or tools like Decker, like Caper in the Castro or nonlinear zines, can fit this description. Twines feel a little too different to me, closer to a text adventure than what I’m talking about, and stuff like Homestuck and 17776 is too linear for that. The SCP wiki does do a lot of cool styling stuff, but pages don’t really cross-link to each other: apparently the backrooms wiki does this a little more, so it might be a little closer to what I’m thinking for this? Anyway this is splitting hairs for the most part. I hope this definition makes sense for this article, if nothing else.

Interestingly, when you google hypertext fiction, the examples it gives you (outside of Pale Fire) are all from the 90s, for which we can attribute a few things. In an article for WIRED that discusses this¹, Steven Johnson mentions the difficulty of reasoning about hypertext fiction and keeping it in your head as you write it, let alone the difficulty of making the damn thing, which is a big factor, but I feel like it’s not the whole story. The late 90s and early 2000s was when people were still making websites on Geocities, for example, and was right before people more actively switched to social networks and social media. As the barrier of entry for being social on the internet got lower, people chose to not make websites when they could just have a Friendster profile instead.

I personally feel like there is also also a correlation between hypertext fiction’s return and Neocities picking up steam. As people want to move away from social media and back toward a more conscious and curated internet presence, they also want to experiment with the form. Neocities lets you build your own website but it also has some social features on top of that,

I don’t normally do “this is my perspective alone” disclaimers but I’m doing one this time because, due to how much worse discoverability is for this compared to, say, a YouTube video.

One of the biggest sources of inspiration for lots of people, myself included, is Wired Sound for Wired People, by fauux. It’s essentially a gallery full of collage web art that uses a lot of imagery from Serial Experiments Lain. I wouldn’t call it hypertext fiction, though. Regardless, this website hosts art that arranges images and text and music and whatnot together, and the next few sites I will talk about explicitly mention fauux as an inspiration or otherwise mention that they like it. fauux themself has moved on from using the site as an artistic outlet, save for some ARG-style puzzles, and has done so for multiple years at this point, but it’s worth discussing.

Terminal 00, or more accurately Angus Nicneven’s author website, is the first I’m discussing that actually fits this mold. Made up of over 2000 pages, you navigate through Terminals, all of which are pointed towards “opening the Gate” while slowly being eaten up by the CoS. Your cursor is a probe, gathering information on them. This isn’t an explanation of what it means, you can look at this video by 4o3o1 for that, but it’s got a lot of examples of the kinds of thing that we will see a lot of: clicking through mazes of pages to find new information, featuring musical accomapnyment, some pages only accessible if you solve a puzzle and look up that page on the site via typing a URL. It also has some interesting tricks, such as pages in darkness that only light up around your cursor. Angus’ site used to say on its FAQ that it was inspired by Wired Sound for Wired People, and though it no longer mentions that fact anymore the site is still linked in the “sites to check out” section.

heaven_online is another site in this vein, created by momotsuki a.k.a. momo. It’s stylistically similar in some senses but has a decent amount to differentiate itself and is telling a different kind of story. Pages added after the witching hour update are more explicitly maze-y than Terminal 00 is, in the sense that navigation through some site sections mostly involves clicking through pages of just images while also maybe solving a small puzzle. It’s also slightly more high tech than Terminal 00, with features such as its loading screen to ensure all the site’s assets are loaded before viewing (and which made viewing the mazes a pain on Australian internet before they could be disabled, hehe). Those mazes are really effective at making you feel lost, though, especially once you get to Haathli (and I still haven’t found a way out of that one).

I want to make a site like these someday (you will see it in its own standalone section of aprilghost.net if I ever finish it) and seeing these comparatively huge titans of websites is simulanteously inspiring and intimidating. Both of these websites have lots of bespoke art going into them. How could I compete? Well, here’s the beautiful thing about making a website, or any art: you don’t need to have impecable technique and talent, you can just make it. As Ivy May, creator of Coquette Dragoon, once posted about the kind-of wonky but charming and endearing art of Ryukishi07: “The fool dunks on the Higurashi paw hand. The wise man realizes if they can produce a paw hand they can make a whole visual novel too.”

Enter godishome, the “Higurashi paw hand” of hypertext fiction (this is a huge complement). Comparatively sparse, but attempting to be a story set in part on the indie web that exists now due to Neocities. It tells a compelling story without using massive images and bespoke music, and it still looks good, and you can read through it and finish it in an afternoon (which makes it unlike Higurashi).

Hey, did you know wikis are kind of like hypertext fiction? Granted, they’re not “fiction”, but they fit every criteria I established earlier. Neurocracy is fiction, however, set in 2049 on Omnipedia, the successor to Wikipedia after it was shut down due to copyright issues, on the day that a tech billionaire is killed… or maybe assassinated? The story is told not just through the wiki pages but through it’s revision history as well: you can see what has changed on different days. It also has one of the coolest cookie disclaimers, which also asks for consent for “neurometric montages”, for those “equipped with a neurometric colloid”.

So what’s the point of using this as the genre of videogame to tell a story? Well, it’s effective for a few reasons. It’s fun to dig around like a detective, to stumble upon things through your own sleuthing, and only a small amount of it is even necessary to find for progression. As of late people have been trying to classify a certain subset of games together into a genre. People generally lump Outer Wilds, Tunic, Void Stranger, and things in that vein together, linked together by the feeling of the world expanding into something you hadn’t considered, where your knowledge is the only real thing gating progression. Some people call this type of game a Metroidbrania apparently? Awful name but we won’t be sticking with it for long here. The point is that Hypnospace Outlaw, as well as a lot of hypertext fiction like I’m describing here, fits into this archetype. You can beat the game remarkably quickly if you know what you’re doing; the SGDQ 2020 speedrun of this game (idk why it was even at GDQ but whatever) is 18 minutes long, but you can spend a lot of time looking through websites and figuring out things about the people who use them and how they connect to each other. It’s cool! I have gone back long after finishing to dig through more stuff.

Hypnospace Outlaw isn’t a website, but it is seeking to emulate them, and thus tells stories with similar conventions to the ones above. What this means is that certain limitations of the web can be circumvented. For example, I mentioned the amount of time it took to load pages when talking about heaven_online, and how it waits for everything to load before letting you see anything (unless you turn loading screens off). It also has other limitations, like how if you go from one page to another one that is playing the same music track, it will reset the track because that’s how webpages work. Hypnospace Outlaw, on the other hand, is a video game that you download all of before playing, and therefore doesn’t need loading screens. For the sake of verisimilitude, however, Hypnospace Outlaw does load pages, but only in some ways. Text and images gradually pop in, in a way that’s more visually interesting than the reality of dial-up internet circa Y2K, but the music loads and starts playing instantly if you have it on.

It’s also worth contrasting the hypertext fiction parts of the game with the part of the game that’s a game within the game: which is to say, Dylan Merchant’s bad car game, a.k.a. Outlaw. The first two times you play it, the game is awful and buggy and either fries your headset or causes injury/death to other people. When the game is done, Dylan has repurposed it into something eulogising the people that his bad car game killed. It’s finally playable, and doesn’t crash anything. The music is a more emotional rendition of the music that was on his homepage. You round up cars representing the people his stupid fucking car game killed, and when you do it says they “ASCENDED” as they drift off to heaven. Then, after you’ve got all of them, he appears and you round him up too. His car, of course, spends so much longer in the ascending animation than anyone else he killed. After playing it, you also get to read the things he would say to the victims, such as how he wished Zane “could have become someone [his] mother was proud of.” All of this can be emotional, but eventually you realise that this was something Dylan made to jerk himself off. Meanwhile, the actual respectful way of eulogising the victims that you see in the game is a list of their names and Hypnospace usernames, shown in one of the few pages where music doesn’t play, and it’s a much bigger gut punch than anything Dylan could ever make.

Music of the Internet

“Ok April Ghost, if that is your real pen name,” I hear you ask now that I’ve prompted it, “that’s cool and all, but are there any insights to be gained worth listing all of these things and spending time talking about them?” I think so! At the very least, context for art can never be a bad thing, even if it’s not something that informed Hypnospace Outlaw’s development. So let’s contextualise!

People have nostalgia for different parts of the old internet, but not so much others, mainly in terms of music. People have fondness for music stored via MIDI, and Hypnospace taps into that: it has it’s own mini analog, HSM, which actually functions as sequenced music in-engine and can be messed around with if you know how. These samples tend to be compressed as well. However, it also has streaming audio, which people weren’t really attaching to their pages in this way in 1999: it would have taken up a lot of bandwidth and taken a long time to download MP3s every time you visited a page unless you compressed it so heavily as to be unlistenable. Napster, the music sharing service, only got started in the middle of 1999, and that wasn’t even remotely close to at streaming speeds. The best indication I have of what streaming audio quality was actually like at the time comes from then-contemporary Flash animations. Below I’ve linked Hatten är din, a Swedish internet meme from 2000. The flash shows off a mondegreen of a song by Lebanese musician Azar Habib, priming the Swedish-understanding listener to interpret it as a drinking game about a hat. You can listen to the audio below. I don’t know whether it was actually meant to be streamed, or just downloaded: I use this instead of one of Neil Cicierega’s animutations, which would have been streamed audio on account of it being on Newgrounds, because it’s a little closer to the date that our game of interest takes place in (and also given that you’ve already heard of Neil Cicierega I’m sure this example is cooler).

Hypnospace Outlaw breaks “verisimilitude” in this way by having the streaming music at various levels of quality, from period accurate compression to what we’re used to nowadays. In late 2020 the podcast The Sound Test did an interview with Jay Tholen about the music of the game, and he mentions that he included streaming music because the “experience of hearing prerecorded songs is more important than being faithful in something that isnt already faithful.” This has been tricky to write about, because I’m not very music literate, but with help from my lovely girlfriend Lainy I have slowly hashed out an understanding of it. Something something Brian Eno quote about the limitations of the medium becoming desirable qualities. Music nowadays does use compression sometimes to evoke specific nostalgia, such as what rateyoutmusic tells me is a genre called “HexD”, but that is more evocative of the early 00s than the late 90s (probably because of the association with flash mentioned earlier). Hypnospace Outlaw doesn’t use compression as a genre signifier in this way, and it doesn’t use it everywhere; while compression is desirable in some senses and in some places the amount of people who like the compressed version of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne’s OST on PS2. (and in the remasters too? Seriously?!) over the higher quality versions is slim to none.

The interview mentioned above is also informative of this. At around 36 minutes, Tholen talks about running some music through an old 1999 version of the MP3 encoder LAME to make it sound more period-accurate, but as someone with not a discerning enough ear to listen for it I can’t tell which tracks have had this done to them and which haven’t. Some tracks have really noticeable compression, though, and a lot of them are more amateurish recordings: Kevv-J’s demos, for example, or Tamara’s recordings of her poetry. Meanwhile, tracks ripped by Slushmouth are so clean that they make me doubt that compression is used everywhere in the first place (though again, I’m not trained in hearing it). There’s also a difference in audio compression of the theme music for each zone in the third capture: Zared and Seepage’s tracks are much less compressed than the bespoke music created for Teentopia, for example. What’s important here is that in between sequenced audio, compression, and other ways of making amateurish sounds, a lot of the music on Hypnospace feels DIY, or at the very least not super professionally produced, and the pieces that aren’t serve as a cool point of comparison. It’s an interesting way of using audio to paint a picture of the slice of the universe we inhabit in the game.

The Soul of the Internet

So a lot of people have tried to use this format to capture a lot of different experiences. Hypnospace Outlaw is trying to capture a fair few things, but there’s more than what people normally talk about. Discussing it in terms of the Y2K-era internet is obviously not incorrect; the team behind the game chose the aesthetic for a reason! Neither is talking about it from the perspective of corporations ruining the internet and ruining people’s lives; that’s what the main plot of the game is about. But talking about Hypnospace Outlaw in only these terms is missing something. I personally think the game manages to capture something about creativity online that I haven’t really seen in other works, and I’d like to talk about it here.

Firstly, let’s talk about Icicle Kid a.k.a. Dripp Boy, whose newer name is awful but that’s just what he called himself so we have to deal with it. You’re first introduced to him in Coolpunk Paradise, with his own Coolpunk song, except it doesn’t sound like any other Coolpunk track in the game: it’s a slow and sad song about a snowman melting instead of the upbeat and poppier stuff that Fre3zer makes by that point. After the first time skip, as Coolpunk starts to implode, he swaps to making Fungus Scene music, and it’s at this point you might get the impression that this guy doesn’t really care that much about genre at all. Most of Fungus Scene is moody and atmospheric; meanwhile, The Mushroom Hop is much more lively and upbeat and cartoony than anything else in the cavern. On the third capture he talks about also making music in some other genre, Pizzastyle, and all 3 tracks of what are ostensibly the same genre do sound pretty different. There is also the one he “made up” called Fungus Pizza. Personally the last thing I want on my pizza is Dripp Boy’s fungus, but as it turns out, that might be what you get.

Dripp Boy illustrates a story writing trick that Hypnospace Outlaw will use almost constantly: introduce something about a character that in some senses may seem like a joke, but then introduce something to suggest that the character is more complex than that. You see it almost immediately in Goodtime Valley: there’s the juxtaposition between people complaining about how everyone outside their zone is a communist or how their sense of humour is lame boomer humour (which may also not be verisimilitudinous, but I don’t remember what chain mail was like in the late 90s so I can’t say with certainty) with pages talking about loved ones passing. In Dripp Boy’s case, it’s his complete inability to parse the tone of a genre or the works within it, and his overwhelming enthusiasm despite this. The joke of the cavern is that Dripp Boy’s weird mushroom gif and his text praising the atmosphere of the page completely clashes with the atmosphere he is praising and is unable or unwilling to create himself. My personal read of Dripp Boy is that I don’t really think he cares much for genre, whether or not he is able to make stuff in it: ultimately he is someone who wants to be around other people making cool stuff, and wants to attach his stuff to those movements they’re a part of. In other words: connection and community.

If the only aspect of the joke was “look at this person who doesn’t understand social cues”, though, I wouldn’t think super highly of it. I sometimes don’t understand them either, and when I was his age or younger I definitely didn’t. The bit that pivots it away from a joke is what FatherFungus, Fungus Scene’s founder, says about the stuff Dripp Boy has done. You can find chatlogs in Dripp Boy’s FLIST: FatherFungus praises his creativity and affirms its place within the movement. After this, on the third capture, his intrusions on other pages in the cavern are gone. Importantly, though, his disregard for genre remains: this is when he comes up with Fungus Pizza. This is what elevates it beyond This Autistic-coded Person Is Weird And That Is Funny Ha Ha. Instead, it feels like growth for both FatherFungus and Dripp Boy: a music scene lead and nudged by the elder that fosters the creativity of the younger in ways that the elder hadn’t seen before. In other words… a mentorship! We’ll talk about that a little more later.

This specific way of looking at art is not specific to teenagers like Dripp Boy. For an example of an adult acting like this, we have Tamara Frost. The first page of hers you see is her main page, talking about her spoken word poetry. She also has her Coolpunk page, where she has a spoken word rendition of the main source material that all Coolpunk comes from (Gray’s Peak Cola theme). Her main page talks about her dreams of getting her poetry published, but not having any way of knowing how to do that. The last capture shows this lack of understanding a little more clearly, though. There are 3 pages in Starport Castle Dreamstation at that point: an ultimatum for leaving by the subcommunity of the Sovereign Alliance of Imagination, a page saying they left… and Tamara’s page, talking about how cool they think the SAI’s pages are. Obviously I’m not implying she made this only after she left, but I’m implying that she didn’t understand the real reasons for why they did what they did, or at least how to contribute, and when they left she didn’t feel enough kinship with them to go with. Most people don’t talk about Tamara, and Tamara doesn’t talk about many people. The exceptions are the Coolpunk review page, which we will talk about later, and the Venue highlight thingy, which misspells her fucking name.

The most insight into Tamara comes from the Hypnospace Archival Project. Since she’s a part of it, Tamara’s character has a luxury that few others do: she can look at her old self and reflect on the person she was after having matured. When she describes the Tamara 15 or more years removed from her in hindsight, she talks about how she felt aimless, how she felt blown every which way by all the things in her life, and how she felt Hypnospace was one of her favourite online communities with how it fostered creativity. Importantly, she did get to be a poet, and a reasonably well known one too. The fact that she is a part of the archival program shows what faith she had in it as a platform.

what does it say about critics the dumpster is clearly not something they like because they explicitly talk about doing something more constructive same with the guy who rates coolpunk. gotta gotta goes hard but because its not coolpunk enough it only gets 50/100

We Should Improve The Internet Somewhat

I’m writing this in 2024. I’m returning to writing this after a long break, after Cohost announced its shutdown in 2024, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his plan to ban social media for those under 16 (and I hope and pray he does not do this via linking social media sites to ID). Twitter is awful at large, despite the niche I’ve carved into it. Tumblr is ok, but I’m aware of the way staff continuously ban transfems, especially transfems of colour. Most conversation happens in private Discord servers. Most people don’t have websites, and most people don’t use forums. The internet continues to spin inexorably toward ruin. What kinds of alternate internet can we envision with the help of Hypnospace Outlaw? What good things does it show, and what good things does it lack? It sure was nice in my last post to just talk about something without talking about society as a whole, so why don’t I spend the end of this one talking about one of the main paradigms that society uses to interact with each other? Why not! I definitely understand what these things are better than everyone else.

Queerness

One absence was something that I didn’t really have articulated until it was something my wonderful girlfriend Lainy brought up after she rolled credits: it’s not a very queer game. I think Tholen and the team he worked with did a good job of making sure the game contained a broad range of people outside of that: Tamara, one of the main focal characters, is black, and Tholen purposefully went out of his way to include rap in the soundtrack with the help of Xalavier Nelson Jr after realising how “white” the music selection in his game was. It’s also a game that introduces you to a cast of old people from its first case and asks you to empathize with them despite them acting, you know, like stuck up old farts. The game has a page talking about socialism. And, to their credit, some characters imply they are gay: Jas has a gay flag on their page, and Tiff implies that she is gay when she talks about herself being cute in the mirror, though you could also interpret it as her just gassing herself up. But no one really speaks about queerness in it, and I think it’s a shame.

I’ve talked about being a trans lesbian on here once or twice, though ultimately I try not to unless it’s relevant (or it makes for a really funny joke). The lack of queerness in this game does speak to an aspect of this identity I grapple with, though. It’s this: being a trans lesbian in this day and age can feel ahistorical. It ISN’T ahistorical, because transfemininity and lesbianism (and the combination of the two) has obviously existed for a long time. But, it can be easy to feel like it’s ahistorical. We have had our history severed from us. The AIDS pandemic is the main thing we tend to discuss in their context, but people are also encouraged if not forced, actively or not, to suppress queerness. Places such as lesbian bars are closing or being gentrified into no longer being spaces for lesbians, or are being taken up by straight women who only go there to avoid men. Outside of talking to a trans woman once, I explored my queerness mostly alone, looking on at other people from afar during lockdowns. I have felt ahistorical: like this was something that didn’t come from anywhere. It was a confluence of factors that severed me from my history. I have slowly attempted to reconnect with it and it has made me emotional when I do.

I don’t blame Hypnospace Outlaw for not talking about this in detail, to be honest: I don’t know if Tholen is straight but he clearly didn’t feel comfortable enough to tackle anything queer in his game, and whether that’s from not knowing enough or not feeling up to it is not for me to discuss. The team was also already small, and they already brought on Xalavier Nelson Jr, and hiring something else just to cover something you don’t feel strongly about doesn’t make much sense. But I think this can give a false impression that the internet was not a queer place, that they weren’t on there, when that wasn’t the case.

I did my best to look through archives of early queer websites for this purpose. The first one that jumped to mind was Lynn Conway. After being outed in 1999 after many years of stealth post-op, she started a webpage talking about her transition and providing resources for it². Jennifer Diane Reitz, owner of the once-extremely-popular game website Happy Puppy, created transsexual.org to share her own experience. Susan’s place, as much as we may talk smack about it, existed as a respository of trans information since 1998. And we can’t forget all of the queer usenet groups that existed, or the queerness that happened on whatever MUDs and MUCKs existed (I can’t find much evidence of that last one, but it had to exist, because people are queer and want to be like themselves in these contexts). We existed, back then and far before it, and to me that’s everything.

Hypnospace doesn’t just lack queerness: it also lacks many if any reference to anime or furry culture, barring one page submitted by someone from their discord (hidden from the main web of pages, but can be found if you search for the tag “discord”). This is probably my specific (white) understanding of the internet showing, but this is where the weird stuff is: stuff made by furries, stuff made by queer people, stuff with anime stylings. It feels odd that these are ommissions from Hypnospace Outlaw when furries had existed for decades. People were not only into anime at the time, but running anime clubs and compiling indexes like the Anime Web Turnpike as far back as 1995. In fact, the internet is a big reason why anime fandom was as prevalent as it was.

Keep this in mind for both this section and the next: if you look at Hypnospace Outlaw and go “this is my ideal version of the internet! I want the internet to be like that now!” then it’s worth examining

Kink and Sexuality

So there’s this post by Jay Tholen.

one funny thing is that we regularly get folks in our Hypnospace discord looking for Hypnosis stuff lol

And you know, with all the talk of how understaffed and overworked the moderators of Hypnospace are, it’s wild that you never see this happen in the game!

I mean, it’s not wild, because they didn’t want to tell a story about kink or whatever, for various reasons. I’m not going to claim that Tholen and his team should have done that. But the internet presented here is basically scrubbed of any sexuality. The only thing that suggests otherwise is that one woman who talks about how her fantasy potions are made from the breastmilk of various fantasy creatures.

There is also a good reason that there isn’t much of it. Hypnospace is marketed as family friendly. And there are kids on there. Which makes sense.

Earlier on the internet, there were places meant for kids, where they could be social. Do you remember them? Club Penguin and the like. I played it when I was younger, and my friends did too, along with other MMO-esque spaces for kids. These don’t exist anymore, as children are slowly funneled toward using social media despite their terms of service and lack of moderation. Despite legislation that may suggest they can’t collect and monetise this data, it is still very valuable to tech companies. This monetisation of data isn’t a thing that Hypnospace Outlaw discusses, because it would be very anachronistic in a way that doesn’t add anything, but if Merchantsoft were a real company they would absolutely be doing that.

Is the Internet Worth Saving?

what can we extrapolate about how the internet should work from this

that funny post about people asking the discord server about hypnosis https://x.com/jaytholen/status/1399809715597623301 but also you never see people on hypnospace doing that so idk, maybe the enforcers are doing a good job obv i understand that the game is a commercial product that doesnt want a r18 rating but it seems pretty antithetical to the kind of crackdowns we are seeing on the internet nowadays

lainy also said it seemed like it could have been queerer

at the same time… escape the chopping mall is a collab between tiff, who is a minor, and linda, who is an adult which isnt really a thing i see a lot of on the internet nowadays

heres the thing: adults and kids interacting is a thing that can and does happen pretty frequently irl the problem with how things are on the internet rn is that social media is meant to encompass everything i happen to know a fair few people with (18+ only) or w/e in their bio, im one of them even if not everything they post about IS 18+ its the fact that social media makes us have everything in one place, and we cant really silo off everything in a way that allows us to post for people who are under 18 or over 18 hypnospace does present a solution: imagine an 18+ zone that minors couldnt visit. you could have pages there for 18+ stuff as well as a general hypnospace presence. idk if linda would even be the one to post nsfw but it would allow her the opportunity to do that while also engaging in doing non-nsfw art with people who are not 18+, a relatively normal thing to do

fauux, terminal 00, heaven online, neurocracy, whatever that one wiki is

hypertext fiction definition for the essay:

• its digital and uses some html type thing
• stuff links to each other
• you can click on pages at your own discretion and you arent really figuring out most narratives linearly

if we dont use this then its like. yeah house of leaves is cool but its not what i care about for this scp wiki also doesnt really count because crosslinking to articles you havent written is not encouraged and i dont think tag pages are enough to make it count

fauux isnt really hypertext fiction, its more of a gallery. same with aether or w/e terminal 00 feels like the first one that is telling a story through nonlinearity heaven online does this. i think a lot about the miku god is home?

my internet usage was post geocities forums, yoyogames sandbox, deviantart (somehow), youtube circa 2008 but hypnospace speaks to creating as someone on the periphery either as autistic person or as a child or just someone who doenst quite get whats going on

hypnospace is kind of anachronistic because of how loading works audio doesnt restart when you jump between pages so while hypnospace is about making art online, it mostly becomes about making music online or at the very least its the main avenue arlen exists. scaries exist.

hypnospace outlaw tamara she doesnt really get it on dec 31 her fantasy page is the only page in there that isnt a dead link to SAI her coolpunk page is this but less, when you consider that SAI is a big structured effort and coolpunk is fucking whatever people even talk shit about her coolpunk page shes on the outside of all of these movements, more or less but shes the one who is able to bankroll the HAP more or less and talks about how she saw it as an avenue for creative expression even if she was so peripheral it was still her engaging in it!! idk bassidia and drip boy fungus scene is an intentionally curated scene/genre but the main way its intentionally curated to not be co-optable in the same way coolpunk is eveyrones got their own cave that is going for a really moody feel and then FUNGUS SCENE NOW DO THE MUSHROOM DROP and the really misplaced mushrooms also bassidia’s talk with drip boy cybercog circus this one is mainly funny did gill see it on the dumpster? is that the reason its the only one there? or did he make something and just give it up in the way that everyone does?