Recovering techie with an MFA, working on like a kajillion writing projects at once. Check out the Post-Self cycle, Restless Town, A Wildness of the Heart, ally, and a whole lot of others.
Trans/nb, queer, polyam, median, constantly overwhelmed.
Current hyperfixation: SS14
Icon by Mot, header by @cupsofjade
I have been writing and role-playing Post-Self stuff so much for a few months now, and gosh, I am still super fond of this setting. A partner and I have been throwing clades together on Wolfery and Discord1, including all sorts of ridiculous Odist bullshit. I am still working on my thesis, but gah, I just want to work on Marsh and the other Post-Self projects in the works, now :D
We even set up a whole-ass server for role-play and world-building, if anyone is interested in that sort of thing.
the term you want to research is "steganography"
I think in the case of pico8 it actually just has a tiny slice of binary data represented as RGB pixels at the bottom maybe? or I may be wrong
If I remember correctly, spore stores all the fun details in its .pngs by encoding it in some form via the alpha channel which you can see if you open one up and mess with the transparency
or you can sort of see it in mangled form here via the time I uploaded a guy to Twitter and tweetdeck ate the transparency leaving the data sprinkles visible for all to see
like apparently you can put arbitrary metadata into a png file but maxis did it this way instead
You can export blueprints of entire little Lego cars of shocking complexity and just swap them around. You always know exactly which blueprint you're dealing with because boom bam it's just a picture!
you don't even need to do anything particularly clever or secret to accomplish this
PNG is a chunk based format (yes this sounds ridiculous to say but each building block is actually formally called a chunk) so things like your header (IHDR), palette (PLTE, if any), image data (IDAT), and so on
So if you wanted to, you could basically just make up your own private chunk type and stuff whatever information you wanted in there. The specification supports this! You're given explicit permission to just make up whatever as long as you do it in a way that won't break officially supported chunks!
But yeah pico-8 does it the steganography way. Probably one, because pico-8 is a fun little toy and that's a fun way to do it. And two, image data will survive reencoding on the web (etc) as long as it's lossless, while most reencoders probably won't know what to do with your private chunk data and would just discard it.
what im saying is you could embed the entire contents of a video of Bee Movie in a chunk that lives inside a 32x32, 8-bit colour icon of a bee
If, say, you are very stupid and want to run an ARG for a book about skunks, you can go even more plain than that.
Dropping off some books at a local bookstore. Hope they like furry stuff~
Clade (n) – /kleɪd/ – post-self theory
A group of individuals patterned off a single root consciousness, formed through branching expansion of the forking of its constituent members.
See also: cladistics, cocladist, up-/down-/cross-tree instance, forking, post-self theory.
— The System Central Library Encyclopedia
To split oneself among however many individuals, to let the mind drift and diverge, to feel the world from points of view not your own, and then let those memories crash down into you…well, it inspires a feeling best described as ‘heady’, to say the least.
Now available for purchase and free to read online!
Content Warnings: "Après un rêve" contains surgery and death; "Support Group for Anomalies in Forking" contains alcohol abuse, body horror, a car accident and injuries, and medical debt; "Cowboy" contains manipulation, complex PTSD, emotional flashbacks, a severe panic attack, and mentions parental death; "She Who Haunts the Storm" contains depression, self-hate, self(?)-harm, coercion, intimidation, and suicidal ideation; "Earthbound" contains death and depression.
