Parallax

gods, it’s been… not a decade quite yet, but over half that, since i had to script a video. i’m so surprised this came together as well as it did.

This is the companion piece to a video about parallax..

I do suggest checking that out together, so this makes more sense, but hey! You do you.

We are now at… 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 layers? Maybe 7? And deeper we dive.

I did not ultimately put this in the script—it didn’t quite fit—but this is the culmination of about a year of self-discovery and conversation, in one of many directions. I am incredibly grateful to everyone I’ve talked to along this, and I’ll probably put some of them in the credits!…once I figure out if I need to ask them one by one or if it can be a general vibes thing. I would not have understood myself nearly well enough to write half of this without the lovely garden community, and I would consider the other half to come mostly from constant lived experiences with my best friend inexorably pushing me forward through hell and back. Slight exaggeration.

I think it’d probably behoove me ( 🐴 ) to talk a bit about who and what is involved in the script, to the extent that I can, now that I’m freed of linear time.

The narrators go by orbit^[1] and aria^[2], in order of appearance. 3^[duh…], who does not make any other sort of appearance here, is the orange text. The script itself serves as the preferred set of captions, a slightly bent mirror of the resulting video itself, and then the spoken-word transcript as the accessible option. Aside from the transcript, every part of this has its own part to play and is the reason the video took so much work to lay out, to record, …though not so much to edit? By the time it hit the cutting room floor, everything was mostly prepared thanks to the surreptitious impulses of a parallax existence. Or fate, if that’s the term you’d prefer to believe in.

[0].

so, the script. another thing that didn’t fit in the final cut, ironically enough. it’s not… not, in the video, but,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

okay.

word and thought are two very different forms of communication, with similar problems. they do not translate 1:1 with each other. if i am not reading off a webpage or game script, assuming i make no mistakes, wysiwyg. input cleanly processes to output. writing a script, rehearsing a point, speech in general is improv, and that was something that i had to wrangle with for a while while recording all this. i, as the everything that i am, cannot force my delivery of thought in speech to align perfectly with text, and that’s just how it is so please enjoy. i already fuck with the feng shui every time i tab to another community, open a different social media, et cetera. as i said, fungal spore expanse type beat is ideal, and fitting to the container i find myself in is a very large part of that.

as such, by matter of course, third thing that has the same general connotation, the script wanted in on the video and got slotted into the only thing left available: captions. i’d say it’s quite comfy there! bit of extra work to coordinate, but well worth the trouble to contribute to the intended experience.

1.

I guess the main thing that stood out for this, besides relearning the entire creative workflow from scratch, is how much it all settles down in the latter half. That and we generally don’t think about music, which is kinda weird if you were to lay out how much of the day music is playing for us to listen to. How much we enjoy it, talk about it, yearn to play it. But that’s for another time; it’s time to let the video sit and be what it is! An audiovisual aid to explaining this thing we call a brain, and how it interfaces (and doesn’t interface, sometimes) with the rest of the world. I pat myself on the back as congratulation that we didn’t attempt to truly convey the fucked part about time perception, because that would run us longer than Sisyphus, quite honestly.

But yeah! It’s weird, seeing how much goes into the early portions and how relatively simple the end is. A downward trend of energy, maybe? Or maybe that’s editor’s bias. Chime in in the comments…of the video…? I’m never enabling comments here, too much trouble. This is the sanctum of non-directionality, and even writing for others, to others, there is never going to be a space left here to reply. Handle it off-site.

…The other thing, actually. Speaking the script into existence, interpretation differences aside as mentioned above, ended up taking a lot longer than expected. Something to consider (maybe) for future projects, which, turns out, do exist! Conceptually. There’s at least one more for the moment; a lot of the other ideas are getting routed to this site as their own thing so that there’s less visual need for talking about things, which is pretty convenient for handling that backlog there.

2.

um what else… right. VRC setup is probably worth talking about.

for one, doing it this way means no having to learn how to animate in blender “properly” (read: for a video), model a bunch of environments, and sync audio! for two, it was fucking annoying, learning how to work with VRCLens. worth it, for what it’s worth! but fucking annoying. the drone controls are in a real bad spot in the menus, and while they are comprehensive with their offerings, they are not intuitive. quite clunky. i’ll keep it on the two avatars that have it there, but any others ones probably aren’t going to inherit it if (or more likely when; it’s fun to wear other skins) they make it to virtual reality. i actually nearly just rolled with the first recording session from how much work it is to set up again for every other shot i wanted, but ultimately caved to the call of the aesthetic. was still worth it. but god damn i think vrc+ is easier, now that they’ve added the drones and stuff.

while i’m here, i also really want elbows for the next time i do this? it’s been surprisingly awkward trying to orchestrate the elbows in the right direction, IK just doesn’t cut it most of the time. probably gonna pick up a slimes expansion pack soon-ish, i hear the supply chain of delivery has eased up on them some… but stuff like crossing arms, letting arms hang, waving them around, it’s all so much harder when there’s no control over the midpoint, and i would certainly appreciate getting that fixed.

oh we’re gonna have to set up a charging hub for those, aren’t we? damn.

3

some cleanup.

emotions and information intake are 2 other things that are similarly difficult to everything else in the video, while being even more difficult to cover, and tb q h, we also forgot to even try to get that in the script. safe to say they prob would have been cut from it. they also…stray a bit too into the weeds of the everything else (we can maybe timestamp this if we want to once the video goes live) that we’re avoiding getting into detail about here, because while it was discovered that a singular experience is decidedly not what i/we/this body experience(s), the framework was originally posited on that being mostly the case, and it just feels more right to respect that.

in brief, though, since i did bother to mention them: emotions are incredibly difficult to understand, not just in the alexithymia way (fuck that spelling, oh my god, i have so many bones to pick with psychology), but in the “none of us really experience too many emotions that are easily parseable as such to the average, more typical mind.” the joy of experiencing magic, the idyllic sense of embarking on another project, it doesn’t, hasn’t, and will continue to won’t compute for so many others that it quite frankly feels like a bit of a waste of time to try to outline how those work.

and yet, try they will.

and for the final final, information intake processing is a big part (to me, anyway) of how picking up reading again has been difficult, why bite-sized media is more comfortable to speed through. unfortunately, together with that is the part where it’s really hard to actively analyze things as we’re reading through them, which is annoying. too used to background handling. one day we’ll figure that out, just a matter of time… but it definitely makes for a tricky time developing opinions on media (or even just in general) when it takes so long to process everything.

of course, we do it regardless!