#sub-q

[twinegardening]

BaoBao by Cass Khaw & James Persaud [IFDB]

Love lingers no matter the format.

A young woman is sorting through her deceased mother’s personal computer and finds an AI in her way.

[s-c-baker]

Two new flash stories + reprints and an audio reprint

Two new flash stories + reprints and an audio reprint

Gack! How is it October?

I have been bad about updating, but have two new stories to share, as well as some reprints and an audio reprint from the past few months!

New Flash Stories

In “Failsafes,” which went live September 5th over at Nature Magzine, a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic future finds a hidden cache with long-lost technology that just might be the key to making people’s lives better…

View On WordPress

[copper-rose]

Horror story...

[cmgroover]

Lime Ergot

Lime Ergot is a text game by Caleb Wilson that was originally written for EctoComp and just republished today by sub-Q magazine. If you don't know about sub-Q, you should: it's the only professional lit mag dedicated to interactive fiction, and it’s free. (As a disclosure, I should mention that it’s published me before, but I’d recommend it anyway.) And if you haven't played Lime Ergot, you should: in my opinion it's the most perfect hybrid between traditional literature and parser gameplay that currently exists.

This is the link to play it. You can't click that link fast enough.

Here's the plot overview: you're a lieutenant stranded at an abandoned colonial outpost with a general. You're in the tropics. It's a hot day. The general wants you to make her a lime cocktail called a "green skull."

Now normally, in a parser game, this would be a puzzle. Collect the cocktail's ingredients. Prepare the drink. Deliver it to the general to solve the puzzle. This is also what happens in Lime Ergot, but the difference is that the puzzle encompasses the entire plot. Finding ingredients isn't a task that sends you scurrying around on a fetch-quest. Instead what you have to do is examine the scenery around you, and then examine that scenery on a deeper level, plunging deeper and deeper until you've located a lime for the cocktail.

What this produces is a hallucinatory effect. You, Lieutenant Musco, never budge from where you're standing with the general on a wharf. You can look, for example, at some foliage growing beside the wharf and discover a rusted sword nestled inside. Examining this sword will reveal a lizard sitting beneath it, examining the lizard will reveal that it's curled around a goblet, and inside the goblet are rotted telegrams that you can read. When you examine the telegrams, the game provides this text:

It seems to be a bundle of telegrams related to the retreat from--sorry, strategic deployment back home from--St. Stellio... though, ah... hmm... it's eight feet away, covered with mold, with slime, the letters wriggling and kinking like the worms that appear in buckets and puddles after a rain storm... How strange. You blink. There's nothing there. Maybe your eyes are fatigued by the sunlight, are playing tricks on you?

This may just seem like a neat trick for the story to be playing, but it's a revolutionary way to deliver a narrative using parser gameplay. Examining your environment to find the limes is a process that not only locates the limes, but also transforms your environment into a fever dream. The mechanics you use to interact with the story are what reinforce, what deliver its meaning.

You're not just solving a puzzle here. In fact, you may not even realize that the game has a puzzle, because the puzzle design has been exploded and repurposed. It's streamlined, it's smooth, it's simply what you do to read the story. In other words, it's the exact opposite from almost every other puzzle where you have to fiddle and tinker with puzzle pieces.

More than that, Lime Ergot accomplishes what it does with a compact system. Since it's a parser game, what this means is that you have to type commands to interact with it. In many parser games, the amount of potential commands is staggering, but that's not true here. You can finish Lime Ergot with only four commands:

EXAMINE (something) TAKE (something) PUT (something) IN (something) GIVE (something)

This means that the game is easily playable even for people who are unfamiliar with parser conventions, which is a great selling point since this game is much closer to traditional literature than it is to a text adventure. It's essentially a short story being delivered via the parser.

But it could never be told as a short story. Its presentation is melded into its narrative. I've been talking about its mechanics, about collecting limes to prepare a cocktail, but I haven't mentioned what the story is actually about. This is a horror story. It's not horror in the normal sense. There are no monsters. There are no tense scenes, such as you might expect to find in a thriller. Everything is indolent and hazy. The horror emerges, not from activity, but from paralysis -- from the decay that has infused St. Stellio's doomed outpost. What damage there is has already been done; now the story's characters are left in the wreckage that they helped create.

At this point, after the retreat -- sorry, "strategic deployment back home" -- of the colonizing forces, both General Tudor-Adolphus and Lieutenant Musco have nowhere left to turn. It doesn't matter that the general led St. Stellio's conquest and that the lieutenant only arrived when it was mostly over. Their fates, as two cogs in the same military system, will be equal. Now they will prepare a cocktail derived from the limes on the island that repelled their government, and that cocktail will not go down well.

Lime Ergot wraps you in the disease that plagues the island. Playing the game is experiencing, in text, the same disorientation that Lieutenant Musco suffers from and that follows in colonialism’s wake.

Even though it's short, Lime Ergot ranks very highly in my personal interactive fiction canon. Near the very top. I can't recommend it to people enough.

[storycade]

Join Our Team! - sub-Q Magazine

Some heroes were made for greatness and others get it liberally thrust upon them, provided that they show a teeny bit of enthusiasm and send a CV.

So we’re a pretty big fan of Sub-Q, and if you aren’t familiar with them yet you really should be! And if you’ve got the time, why not join their team? 

[addict-by-design]

I just did my first sub-Q injection into the fat of my hip and it didn’t even hurt going in, now it kind of burns and stings a bit but seriously that was SO much easier and I dont think I will have an issue doing it every friday.

The only worrysome thing for me is that I am bleeding a bit more than normal but I think thats because after I rubbed the bubble out I applied too much pressure. 

[queerboiswag]

I have a question for my peeps who do sub-q shots

I bled last time i did my shot and now it kinda hurts where i took it there is a painful bump thing... is it bad? will it go away on its own (its annoying and hurts alot)?