Can I get a ZAM?
Feb. 4th, 2006 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enteleinI'll give you a sha!
Four years ago today, I pulled a little stunt on the Cloudmakers list that'd likely invoke vulva puppets and other forms of excoriation from the Unfiction kids today: I shilled a game I was puppetmastering. (And it's so funny, looking at the PM dev list, to see how much I loathed having to do it in the first place. Hee!)
Four years ago, I was magicked into a place where human connections became the story, and the puzzles were a means to an end: to bring people together and drown us all in possibilities and dreams and nightmares. Sometimes I think we hope to come out the other side improved, but no matter the cost, the journey was amazing and life-changing for me. (sometimes, I confide in people that Lockjaw saved my life. Because it did.)
Thank you, once again, to all the people who played. To the people that played Euchre every Wednesday, who waited impatiently for updates, who helped to create an amazing endgame that moved me more than you could ever know. Thank you to the fellow puppetmasters who were crazy and beautiful and funny and stressed out beyond belief, creating a labor of love that constantly had me in awe. I feel lucky to have been dropped randomly into a group that turned out to be so organically tight. A creative force. Adaptable. Full of love.
Good times. Four years. Holy moley.
Here's some meta boilerplate: the grrl-e-grrl domain no longer exists in its game form. However, there is an archive of the site over at ARGN. Bless ARGN and its little socks. Also, it's a shill because grrl-e-grrl was an in-game site. Barbie Mills? A character in the game. Our conceit, as puppetmasters, was to get players to notice something odd about a string of numbers at the end of the article on female gamers, a string of numbers that would get them to another website in the game that would get the mystery introduced: all, apparently, is not well with the world of genetic engineering. ;)
From: "glitterbook" <krystyn@glitterbook.com>
Date: Mon Feb 4, 2002 12:25 pm
Subject: META/NEWS: Article on Cloudmakers glitterbook
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Hey all,
I got a nice e-mail from the woman who posted here recently looking
for input from females who played the Beast this past year.
The article quotes a couple of us, and has a pretty decent write-up
on our Cloudmakers experience! It looks to be a zine that went from
print to web recently ...
Check it out:
+++
Thank you so much for helping me out with the article.
I thought that you might enjoy seeing how it turned
out. It can be accessed at
http://www.grrl-e-grrl.com
+++
-Krystyn
http://www.glitterbook.com
Four years ago today, I pulled a little stunt on the Cloudmakers list that'd likely invoke vulva puppets and other forms of excoriation from the Unfiction kids today: I shilled a game I was puppetmastering. (And it's so funny, looking at the PM dev list, to see how much I loathed having to do it in the first place. Hee!)
Four years ago, I was magicked into a place where human connections became the story, and the puzzles were a means to an end: to bring people together and drown us all in possibilities and dreams and nightmares. Sometimes I think we hope to come out the other side improved, but no matter the cost, the journey was amazing and life-changing for me. (sometimes, I confide in people that Lockjaw saved my life. Because it did.)
Thank you, once again, to all the people who played. To the people that played Euchre every Wednesday, who waited impatiently for updates, who helped to create an amazing endgame that moved me more than you could ever know. Thank you to the fellow puppetmasters who were crazy and beautiful and funny and stressed out beyond belief, creating a labor of love that constantly had me in awe. I feel lucky to have been dropped randomly into a group that turned out to be so organically tight. A creative force. Adaptable. Full of love.
Good times. Four years. Holy moley.
Here's some meta boilerplate: the grrl-e-grrl domain no longer exists in its game form. However, there is an archive of the site over at ARGN. Bless ARGN and its little socks. Also, it's a shill because grrl-e-grrl was an in-game site. Barbie Mills? A character in the game. Our conceit, as puppetmasters, was to get players to notice something odd about a string of numbers at the end of the article on female gamers, a string of numbers that would get them to another website in the game that would get the mystery introduced: all, apparently, is not well with the world of genetic engineering. ;)
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:53 pm (UTC)Sure, real-life may have pulled some of us away from the ARG worlds, but we know that we'll always have a place there. And you, milady, will always have the tiara that I gave you at endgame.
(I still can't believe that it's almost five years since a simple picture of a boat changed my life)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 08:04 pm (UTC)Where's my tiara?!
/me tackles krystyn and steals, err, borrows her tiara
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 08:02 pm (UTC)That was a crazy crazy time. I cannot believe how hard it was for us to get CM to notice the game and I *cringe* with all that we did to get them to. And, while I completely understand the hows and whys behind the players frustration over at unfiction, I can also understand the frustration behind launches.
Step 1: Barbie soliciting help for the article (what's funny... I was talking to Jamesi last night about me doing that exact same article for ARGN only with the current unfiction crowd and was going to post Barbie's original email along with my request to UF later today. The timing of it all didn't even occur to me.)
Step 2: Barbie emailing all the respondents (even those that didn't send back the interview request) with a link to the article. - noone noticed.
Step 3: Panic and debate. What to do?! What to do?!
Step 4: You posting your bit. - noone noticed
Step 5: "Naga" going into #evanchan and posting the math formula to 45912 - noone noticed
Step 6: Panic & Debate. What to do?! What to do?!
Step 7: Freak out as minutes after Naga leaves #evanchan & we panic, y2kbozo notices an ingame site a week or so before it was going to go live. What were the chances of that?
Step 8: Change the found site to point to your post. (not the best of decisions ever made, but I wouldn't change a thing)
That was a crazy, crazy night that led to a crazy, crazy couple of months. As much as I look back and cringe at some of the things we did (god, isn't hindsight a curse), it couldn't have been any better. The game was one thing, but it was the people. More so than any game that I've worked on since, the people involved defined it. The players were AMAZING. Their joy and patience (are you feeling virtuous?) and friendship... man, they made the game as much as we did. And us... the insane six that stuck it through to the end. I can't even put into words how much I care for you all.
Wow. 4 years is both a lifetime and a moment ago.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 08:55 pm (UTC)Not bad for a buncha BOZOS, eh? ;P
Euchre nights were so much fun. I remember how frustrated I was the first couple of times because I couldn't get into Yahoo Games and I missed out. Then that thrill when java finally worked through my proxy and I could see the game room and the chat! Wow.
And I still miss Moot.
!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 01:08 am (UTC)So much work, so much fun, and so many memories. It remains my favorite from a puppetmaster standpoint, and maybe even from a player standpoint. I was an early member on the Beast, but so much of that time was spent in WTF-land that I don't have a lot of early memories of it.
I think of the players and their excitement and the bonds that formed between them and, in some ways, between us and them from opposite sides of the curtain and it's just about the best memories a guy can dredge up. Even better than nachos and pie and TOOCs and euchre and secret dark side ramblings and ninjas.
We were crazy kids putting on a show in the barn, and I'm glad we did it.
Wolf
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 01:41 am (UTC)Shill
Date: 2006-02-06 04:22 pm (UTC)