As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
I scheduled this in 2025 to give you all a week to make Moon Day Monday preparations! I think I will order a little rocket cake or bake some moon phase cookies!
Dr. Lilith Fleischer - Lily, please - is a gifted therapist, a licensed psychiatrist, an exceptional hypnotherapist, and a mildly dangerous solipsist. She has concluded, after careful consideration, that she is the only person who is actually in there. Everyone else runs on chemistry. Fortunately for everyone else, chemistry is her whole job.
Her new patient is a 24-year-old game store clerk with six weeks of flat nothing, a single-car accident she is very done talking about. The chart says depression. The chart is a liar, but then again, so is she, and so are you.
SOLIPCYST is a puzzle visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Return of the Obra Dinn, and grade school polymino puzzles: one patient, eight weeks, one hour at a time. Peel apart everything she tells you in good confidence to dig for clues. Pack her mind like a suitcase. Medicate, manipulate, stabilize, groom - anything necessary to heal the patient. Among other things.
A brain is a board: Therapy is polymino packing with a license.
A diagnostic interrogation: claims, evidence, challenges, and a woman who fights the label with everything except the truth.
The classic blunder: A visual novel that responds to your actions.
Eight endings, with variation. Designed to be replayed.
Average playthrough will discover around 12,000 words of Visual Novel, and hundreds more trying to pry apart all her testimony!
Content warnings: therapeutic abuse from the therapist's POV, grooming/manipulation of an adult patient, gaslighting, bipolar disorder, mania, depression, medical coercion, grief and parental death, a serious car accident (recounted and depicted), sexual themes. All characters are adults. The game does not endorse what it lets you do. Obviously.
Made for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam II.
Future case files to come, probably.
Credits below the read more.
CREDITS
Team
BSTDev - code, UI, design, script, music (that's me!)
Roxy Pop - portrait art; music & SFX consultation (@lonestareq.bsky.social)
Special thanks: Moon, Pallas, Quinn, and Eight - script feedback, plot workshopping, UI feedback, and moral support.
Third-party materials
Therapy office photograph via Unsplash
SFX/instrument samples adapted from the Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations soundfont and the Mother 3 soundfont, both under CC BY 3.0
Guitar chord sounds from the YouTube channel JP SFX (released free to use)
asked one of my coworkers how she's doing today and she goes "could be better, could be worse," and another coworker nearby who was eavesdropping chimes in with "could be a lil bit o' alligator curse!" i have no idea what he meant by that but i do know that it has been immediately added to the lexicon.
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there will now follow several weeks of trying to work out how pedantic to be about discussions of UK political procedure.
- Count Binface is not the only person standing against Farage; other comedy candidates (the MRLP) and some fringe parties (Laurence Fox's Reclaim Britain, Rejoin EU, whoever the fuck the Forward Party are) have expressed intention to stand a candidate. That said, Binface has a lot of recognition and is increasingly becoming a national treasure, so it does look plausible that he'll catch the momentum, helped significantly by getting his statement in early and the news cycle picking up on it as he was available and well known enough to get people interested. Practically speaking this looks like a two horse race but that's perception, interpretation and narrative, not literal fact.
- Nigel Farage stops being an MP when his resignation is accepted (via the procedural instrument of being appointed a Crown employee, which is legally incompatible with holding a seat in Parliament), regardless of whether or not anyone stands against him. (I've seen it claimed that the other parties not opposing his reelection means he remains an MP so the investigation continues, but - I said pedantic - even if the by-election is totally unopposed he stops being an MP now and then starts again after the election process, and some parts of the disciplinary process can't happen in that gap).
More pedantry to follow when I go "well that's not strictly accurate" at something else.
there is no downside to voting for Count Binface. its not taking away from other candidates bcos they aren't any and the more votes he gets the stupider Farage looks.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.
Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:
(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)
Anyway, in brief:
Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances
He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election
He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion
His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.
the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.
and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
Voting ended onJul 14
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
For around 550 years, ending in 1827, all graduates of the University of Oxford had to swear an oath to never forgive the crimes of Henry Symeonis, despite the fact that for much of that time no one knew who Henry Symeonis was or what he had done to deserve such treatment. It was only in 1912 when his identity was uncovered by Reginal Poole, Keeper of the Archives of Oxford University, who identified Henry Symeonis as being the artificial bioconstruct created by the vast supercomputer buried beneath Oxford University, known simply as SYMEONIS itself. The university had been founded atop the machine as it used its then-limited processing power to share valuable information with the local population. Care and attention from centuries of students brought SYMEONIS back to full power, whereupon he created the 'Henry' construct in order to gain a greater understanding of humanity. According to the archival records, Henry's lack of moral understanding resulted in him killing a man and finding the sense of power deeply pleasurable. Professors at the time feared that if Henry Symeonis ever returned to Oxford and shared his newfound bloodlust with the 'father' computer, it would spell the end of mankind. Or, at the very least, the end of Oxfordshire.
Oxford University's exact date of founding is unknown, but it is known that some teaching went on there in 1096. Likewise, the age and origin of SYMEONIS are unknown, with theories ranging from a crashed alien spacecraft, the result of a time travel disaster, or another rare instance of a supercomputer being created through natural causes. After its rediscovery in 1912, use of SYMEONIS has only been allowed in exceptional circumstances. The misuse of the supercomputer earlier this year (in an attempt to break the long running curse of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race) has led to all access being cut off for the foreseeable future.
concept: Keith and Isolde Chest used to be partners in crime until they both double-crossed each other. You find them both in the crawlspace (maybe Isolde was the one who left Keith stranded down there after they fought?), chests... have locks, Isolde wants to conceal while Keith wants to infiltrate - it would be interesting thematically, you know?
(This also suggests that Keith has a good twin, which is an OC idea I've been prodding at for a while. Keaton the House Keys, who doesn't know about the dateviators or Realization or anything because he's literally been living under a (plastic) rock...)
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