Who Killed The World? Public Release!

As announced at the beginning of the month, from now on I'm going to be releasing public versions of my books on itchio, and I'm pleased now to give you the public version of Who Killed The World. If you've wanted to pick up my books, or pass them along to someone else, but the monthly Patreon commitment wasn't feasible, here's another way you can support my work!

Hiatus Announcement

Storming the Ivory Tower is going on hiatus! For at least a month. Maybe more!

Here's the thing. I've got a new part time job doing an Art Related Thing out in meatspace that pays better as a part time job than StIT currently does as something I'm spending most of my time working on or at least thinking about. Meanwhile, if you've been following my increasingly frustrated asides in various Patreon posts you'll know that I haven't really been well since, like, sometime in December probably. I don't know when I'll stop not being well, because I don't know what's wrong and getting actual healthcare is Pretty Difficult. Also meanwhile, I need to find a new roommate because my old one got chronic fatigue and had to move out. Also also meanwhile, my subscriptions on Patreon are shrinking, and so is my readership on individual articles.

Though it does seem that while individual users are going down, the time people spend on the site is going up slightly so... so I don't know what that means. In fact I'm feeling a bit bewildered by the whole project at this point, on a lot of levels. So, while I have an actual stable source of income, I'm taking a month (or more) off to take stock, make some more progress on some larger projects, and maybe get to a better place with physical and mental health.

I am planning on posting some progress type stuff on Patreon in the intervening time so if you want, like, effectively free content from me, it's probably worth staying subscribed. You can jump over there for some more detailed plans if you're already subscribed--oh, and of course, that's a good way to find out when I return. In a month. Or more.

You Didn't Get Rogue One: A Monograph of Essays on Star Wars RELEASE

Despite its box office and critical success, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story faces an astounding number of misinterpretations. Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its improbably radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars. Misreadings range from the well intentioned ("It was fun but the characters had no agency!") to the insidious ("Is the Empire really so bad?"), but they share one quality: for one reason or another, their writers just didn't get Rogue One.

Featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside essays exclusive to this collection, the new monograph "You Didn't Get Rogue One" lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the ostensibly thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise. In order to do so, though, the essays have to take down decades of misreadings by everyone from Catholic pundits, Internet shoutymen, and even... George Lucas himself! The Dark Side clouds everything, but this collection takes a step towards bringing Rogue One and Star Wars into a new light.

You Didn't Get Rogue One can be read through Storming the Ivory Tower's Patreon:

• For $1 you can read the raw text of the book
• For $2 you can download the open source graphics used to illustrate the book
• For $3 you can hear the podcasts that accompany the articles
• For $5 you can download the full monograph in epub form, fully illustrated!

Announcing: A Star Wars Collection

Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its surprising, improbable radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars.

This upcoming (as yet unnamed) collection, featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside exclusive content to tie it all together, lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the apparently thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise, and takes aim at the various misreadings of the series propagating on the Web.

The collection will be available in downloadable epub form, alongside four previous StIT collections, to $5 supporters of the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, and the raw, unformatted text will be available for just $1. Subscribe now as a $5 Patron to get your name in the final book as a sponsor of the project!

(Note: Twilight of the Superheroes is still happening, it's just much much more complicated than I expected, so I'm pushing out this collection while it's fresh in order to tide everyone over while I continue working on the Superhero project in the background.)

Announcing: Two New Twine Projects!

Twilight of the Superheroes

Narrowly winning the recent vote for what book project I should tackle next, Twilight of the Superheroes will collect my critical writing on superhero media that didn't make it into My Superpower is Manpain!, and release it with a bunch of bonus content and an overarching structure drawing upon Alan Moore's planned-but-never-realized superhero crossover epic of the same name. Like If The Train Stops We All Die, this will be released in an experimental Twine format that uses hypertext to imagine new possibilities for a series of essays about the failure of imagination in superhero media.

Twilight of the Superheroes will be available to $5 Patreon backers, and the raw text and bonus essays will be available to $1 backers.

A Host of Gentle Terrors

(a walking simulator)

You remember wandering in a strange and disorienting land, a land of fluid geography and unstable biology...

A Host of Gentle Terrors is a text-based exploration of a constantly shifting world and its strange inhabitants. Currently in demo form, this twine might be called an open-world procedurally generated walking simulator, or it might just be called a free-form narrative about discovery, monstrosity, and being alone in an often surreal and unsettling landscape.

This demo will be available both to Patreon backers and on (as yet undetermined) other platforms in the near future, with a fully realized release possible depending on interest.

This Cool Walking Simulator Features:

• No Leveling
• No Crafting System
• Bullets! (but no guns to shoot them with)
• No Stamina Meters
• No Retro Pixel Art
• Some Zombies?
• Non-Euclidean Geography
• Uncomfortably Biological Machinery
• A Fishing Mini Game Everyone Loves Fishing Mini Games Right?
• Tyranny And Mutation (The Concepts, Not The Album)
• Queer Shit I Mean It's A Twine What Honestly Did You Expect

Keep checking Storming the Ivory Tower and the StIT Patreon for these releases, coming soon!

If The Twine Stops We All Die

Over this break, I decided to teach myself Twine. As one does. The result, which I'm releasing to all of my Patreon backers as a thank you for supporting me over the past year, is a now hyper version of my last article, "If The Train Stops We All Die." There's nothing too complex going on here, but I've tweaked and expanded some of the text and I'm hoping that the results help to highlight the intertwined nature of this article (which was always written, actually, with a hypertext format in mind).

As my $2+ backers know, I like making my stuff as accessible as possible, and the great thing about these Twines is that you can actually pull them into the program yourself and decompile them to see how they work, in the same way people are welcome to look at my original Krita files to see how I compose the layers for my artwork! This is still pretty dour stuff, of course, to ring in the new year (Happy Yekaterina Bridge! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!) but I really am thankful to all of you for your support, and I wanted to do something extra and experimental as an added sort of end of the year perk.

So check out Patreon to download this new Twine (and something extra...), and if you haven't yet subscribed consider doing so to get access to a couple years' worth of exclusive bonus content!

A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities: Homestuck and Form RELEASE

Homestuck made headlines in 2012 when it earned 2.5 million dollars to fund the creation of an adventure game based on the series, but few commentators were equipped to discuss the most remarkable part of Homestuck's success:

Homestuck was arguably the first truly successful hypercomic, a comic that can only exist on the web.

A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities analyzes Homestuck in the context of the new hypercomics boom that it inspired. Containing newly revised and updated versions of five articles from Storming the Ivory Tower on Homestuck's formal techniques, the book places them alongside brand new and exclusive reviews of works like Awful Hospital, Ava's Demon, and Neokosmos, digging into the techniques and technologies that make these comics possible. 

Laying out the history of hypercomics for the first time, this book is an essential read for anyone looking to better understand why Homestuck is successful, and the possibilities that its formal techniques offer.

You can instantly access the fully illustrated ebook of A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities, as well as my previous three books, through a $5 subscription on Patreon, or access the text draft for just $1. Additionally, becoming a backer gets you loads of other perks:

$1 Backers: Prequel Adventure Review Is Prequel Adventure a story about making a cat cry, or is it more a story about coming together to dry her tears?		$1 Backers: Ruby Quest Review Ruby Quest is uneven as hell, but might it offer a glimpse into an emerging rhetorical mode for fiction?		$1 Backers: Neokosmos Review Could Neokosmos represent hypercomics becoming the most attractive medium for professional visual storytellers?
$1 Backers: Ava's Demon Review Does Ava's Demon represent the future of how hypercomics are produced?		$1 Backers: Alastere Review Does a JRPG actually need an active player at all to tell its story?		$1 Backers: Awful Hospital Review Does Awful Hospital's blending of form and theme surpass even that of Homestuck?
$3 Backers: Sleuth And His Problems In this StIT Podcast, I ramble in dazed fashion about Problem Sleuth and get distracted by researching the entire history of HTML development.		$2 Backers: Original Art Download the original Krita file I used to paint the cover image!		FREE: Problem Sleuth Review Problem Sleuth, Bard Quest, and Jailbreak may not be as renowned as Homestuck, but they helped put Andrew Hussie on the cultural map. But is Problem Sleuth really a comic? Or is it a game? Or a hypertext? Or is it something else entirely?
$5 Backers: A Bodyless and Timeless Persona			$5 Backers: A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities

Vriska as Fight Club Fan: A Bodyless and Timeless Persona Teaser Excerpt and Book Announcement

The following is an excerpt from my new Homestuck collection, A Bodyless and Timeless Persona, part of the essay "Is There A Text In This Classpect?" This essay, exclusive to the collection, applies reader-response theory to Homestuck in order to answer the question: "Just what is a Homestuck character, anyway?" The answer is, predictably, pretty weird and complicated. This excerpt comes from a section about one of the weirder things Homestuck characters represent: you, the reader. You can read a previous excerpt from the beginning of the essay here.

We have the suggestion from the start of Homestuck, even if it's a suggestion that comes pre-undermined, that the characters are... us, the readers. This is the source of some real interpretive weirdness, because it's not really possible to resolve the contradictions present in the first few pages of John's introduction: in many ways we do guide the actions of the characters, but once created the text is static barring the occasional games and things. And if the comic invites us to take on a role of far deeper identification than normal, with sequences like John's trip through the timeline demanding that we do actions for the characters, like entering passwords in order to continue, it also continually reasserts the autonomy of the characters and their ability to reject everything from authorial intervention to our own desires for the narrative.

One of the weirder instances of this comes midway through Act 6, with the line "You are now Caliborn."

A Bodyless and Timeless Persona: Essays on Homestuck and Theme RELEASE

A Bodyless and Timeless Persona is now available for $5 patrons of Storming the Ivory Tower!

A Bodyless and Timeless Persona: Essays on Homestuck and Theme covers four previous essays from Storming the Ivory Tower exploring everything from Gnostic themes in Homestuck to the way the comic makes use of difficulty. Additionally, the collection features an exclusive triple-length article, "Is There A Text In This Classpect?," which explores all the different possible answers to the question "just what is a character in Homestuck?"

At the end of Homestuck's seven year journey, this collection aims to be a starting point for anyone interested in delving deeper into the meaning of the comic and its complex and rewarding mythology, symbolism, and narrative experimentation.

A Bodyless and Timeless Persona is available as a full PDF collection to $5 subscribers to the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, but you can also access the text, including the exclusive bonus article, at lower reward tiers:

• FREE: Read a teaser from the beginning of "Is There A Text In This Classpect"
• $1.00 per article: Access the full text of the document, including the bonus article
• $2.00 per article: Access the actual Krita files for the original cover image
• $3.00 per article: Access the three hours of podcast material created for several of the articles
• $5.00 per article: Access the full collection in PDF form

And don't forget that all backers at this tier also have access to my previous collections, Neighquiem for a Dream, and My Superpower is Manpain!

StIT Reviews: The Gnostic and the Satanic

Many of my articles are driven, to a greater or lesser extent, by necessity. I have to weigh writing an article against considerations like: can I fill out a full 3000-4000 word piece on this topic? Or: does anyone but me give a shit about this thing? Or: has anyone but me even HEARD of this thing?

So, frustratingly, I often find that there's stuff I'd like to write about that just doesn't fit the usual format of StIT. Nevertheless, there's loads of stuff I want to cover, and I have enough of a readership now that I want to make people aware of smaller projects that they might otherwise miss.

With that in mind, I'm going to start putting out articles like the one you're about to read: articles that are composed of smaller reviews or spitballing about particular topics, linked by some sort of loose theme. These are articles not intended to scoop up new readers but as something for longer-term readers of the blog, stuff designed not to get hits but to open up space for me to explore stuff I'm passionate about in a fairly off-the-cuff way.

The following reviews are just four of a nine that I've written so far. The rest can be viewed by my backers on Patreon starting at the $1 tier. I'll be adding more reviews periodically, but right now this exclusive body of work contains writing on Grant Morrison's Action Comics, a summary of China Mieville's theories of Weird and Hauntological horror, some discussion of squid people, and a review of the first two books in the Song of the Lioness quartet from my perspective as a transgender person.

If this stuff seems interesting, I welcome you to become a backer to see all the reviews.

It's kinda like a direct line into my brain as I respond to what I'm reading.

Oh, and hey, you know what I have banging around in my brain a lot?

Gnostic Christianity.

Particularly since Homestuck just ended with a conclusion that was, as I predicted four years ago, Gnostic as fuck.

So let's talk about some stuff that's engaged with Gnosticism in interesting ways.

Panel from Lady of the Shard

Just Peachy: Homestuck, Act 6, and Difficulty

==> Storming the Ivory Tower Writer: Fondly Observe Libations

You, which is to say I, observe your, which is to say my, IMMACULATE DOMAIN, containing my IMMACULATE CHAIR and IMMACULATE SELF. You (read: I) have cleared away all those EXTRA SAM KEEPERS which were clogging up the joint, repaired the roof that's been busted for SEVERAL YEARS, and finally gotten some NICE WINE which you (still me) are currently fondly regarding.

You (I) have achieved the absolute apex of God Tier powers, which includes among other things fixing roofs, ushering extraneous versions of people gently but firmly out of the narrative so they don't clutter up things for the real, true versions, and to make absolute pronouncements with assured certainty, which everyone will accept automatically you're sure (which is to say I am sure).

==> StIT Writer: Demonstrate Abilities.

Act 6 and Act 7 do a much better job of addressing and resolving character arcs than [s] Cascade does.

Boom. See that?

Staggering in its radical brilliance but fundamentally undeniable in its accuracy.

(Sam Keeper): What? You can't just say something like that and pat yourself on the back! There's loads of stuff you'd have to explain to make that make sense to people.

==> StIT Writer: Ignore Unwelcome Intrusion

(Sam Keeper): Are you listening to me? You're leaving out so much important information, like even ignoring the fact that you haven't explained why you're even MAKING that comparison, the comparison is only interesting if you talk about a bunch of other stuff that Act 6 is doing. I mean yeah the whole act is basically about experiencing difficulty and working through that difficulty rather than expecting flashy magical solutions, and that APPLIES to this comparison, but the comparison really isn't interesting unless you talk about all that stuff first!

(Sam Keeper): In fact, even people that seem to agree with me that the end of Homestuck was pretty great take as given the idea that [s] Cascade resolved a load of stuff, and they position [s] Act 7 in opposition to this.

(Sam Keeper): Look, just, fill people in a bit! Act 6 is difficult but that difficulty is really interesting and worth talking about, so let's talk about it!

==> StIT Writer: Indulge This Walking Narrative Cul-De-Sac

Neighquiem for a Dream book release!

I am thrilled to announce that Neighquiem for a Dream has been fully released.

Containing all my articles on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and one all new exclusive article, this book charts the early promise of the show and its fandom, all the way to its slide into ignominy and disaster!

Starting with one of the first articles that put me on the (admittedly fairly small) map as a blogger, this collection covers a long history of StIT articles and is accompanied by brand new commentary exclusive to this collection. Additionally, an exclusive article appearing only in this collection, "Trans Night Mare," examines the recent episode Brotherhooves Social and what its use of the transphobic "Man in a Dress" trope represents from my perspective as someone who began my gender transition alongside the growth of MLP's popularity.

Neighquiem for a Dream is available as a full PDF collection to $5 subscribers to the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, but you can also access the text, including the exclusive bonus article, at lower reward tiers:

$1.00 per article: Access the full text of the document as it's being written, including the bonus article

$2.00 per article: Access the actual Krita file for the original cover image

$3.00 per article: Access the audio version of the bonus article

$5.00 per article: Access the full collection in PDF form

PREVIEW:

Become a Patreon backer and read the rest!

And don't forget to check out the previous collection, My Superpower is Manpain!, a collection of articles on superheroes and male power fantasies!

Announcing: Neighquiem for a Dream--A StIT Collection

Coming Soon from Storming the Ivory Tower:Neighquiem for a Dream

Containing all my articles on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and one all new exclusive article, this collection charts the early promise of the show and its fandom, all the way to its slide into ignominy and disaster!

Starting with one of the first articles that put me on the (admittedly fairly small) map as a blogger, this collection covers a long history of StIT articles and will be accompanied by brand new commentary exclusive to this collection. Additionally, the brand new article will explore the recent episode Brotherhooves Social and what its use of the transphobic "Man in a Dress" trope represents from my perspective as someone who began my gender transition alongside the growth of MLP's popularity.

Neighquiem for a Dream will be available as a full PDF collection to $5 subscribers to the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, but you can also access the text, including the exclusive bonus article, at lower reward tiers:

$1.00 per article: Access the full text of the document as it's being written, including the bonus article

$2.00 per article: View the images produced for this collection 

$3.00 per article: Access the audio version of the bonus article

$5.00 per article: Access the full collection in PDF form

And don't forget to check out the previous collection, My Superpower is Manpain!, a collection of articles on superheroes and male power fantasies!

Special Release: My Superpower is Manpain!

The first Storming the Ivory Tower article collection is ready for release!

Featuring revised versions of my articles on The Dark Knight Rises (Shadow of the Bat), Arrow (Liberal from a Distance and Love Me I'm a Liberal), and Grant Ward (Everybody Hates Grant Ward), My Superpower is Manpain! explores the idea of the male superhero and his power to warp the narrative and the ethics of a story around himself.

In addition to these updated versions of past articles, now with new illustrations, the collection also includes an all new, exclusive article entitled Hugging the Joker, which grapples with the theme and legacy of Alan Moore's famous Batman comic The Killing Joke.

While the full collection in lovely PDF form is being released only to $5 backers on my Patreon, you can gain access to parts of the content:

$1 BACKERS:
You get to read the full draft text of the collection, including the bonus article, Hugging the Joker! If you want to read the document but can't afford the nice ebook version, this is your tier.

$2 BACKERS:
Want to see the various images I produced for this work? This is the tier for you. I plan to also put together some wallpapers based on the internal images, so keep an eye out for that.

$3 BACKERS:
The Podcast Tier! I record audio versions of my articles before I write them. The older pieces are from before I started doing this, but there is a full audio draft of Hugging the Joker available to $3 subscribers.

$5 BACKERS:
You get to read the full, finalized, typo free, illustrated version of the document, in lovely PDF form! And, of course, you'll get to read the article collections that will follow!

$.50 BACKERS:
Don't have enough to contribute to these tiers? You can still guide Storming the Ivory Tower by commenting on my ongoing list of future articles, which I have updated to include ideas for future article collections. You'll also be the first to know the title and content of the next collection.

Q&A:

Q: Will the next one take as long to produce as this one did? Why did this one take so long?

A: God I hope not. It took so long because this stuff is all a lot harder than I expected, and learning new programs, dealing with literal and computer viruses, and mental health problems all suck. I learned a lot in this process and I think I might be able to produce the next collection much more rapidly. I'm aiming for three months, but I'd love to get it out in just two.

Q: What kind of permissions do we have for this collection?

A: I'm releasing this under a CC BY-NC-SA license, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want with it, except resell it, or use it to produce something for sale or something that isn't under a similarly open license. If you want to share it around, that's your choice.

Q: So then why put it behind a paywall? Isn't that kinda dumb?

A: I don't think so. If people want to share it, that's up to them. But I think this subscription tier, which tends to be about $6 a month, given that it's only $2 more than the next tier down, is a fair amount of money for the work I did on this project (if anything, it's probably far below minimum wage!) and I want to basically signal that this is what this project is worth to me.

I see that as separate from the rights of the end user to do what they want with the document that they paid for.

And hey, it promotes the good values of hard work and cooperation: you have to do the work of finding a download of the doc, and you have to cooperate with someone to get them to put the doc on the pirate bay or whatever for you! I like to think that I'm promoting good social values.

Q: I can't afford the weekly subscription but I want to read it! I don't care about the other lower tiers.

A: I'm not sure how to handle this exactly but if you're interested, shoot me an email at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com and I'll see if we can work something out.

ANNOUNCING: My Superpower is Manpain!

Folks there's no article this week, if you haven't caught on to that yet, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with involving my day job and my mental illness.

However, I have not been idle! No indeed, I have been hard at work on a scheme that is only now coming to fruition! You see, I have a plot, a grand plot, to defeat all my foes in one blow, with my ultimate superpower!

What is my superpower you ask?

Hah. Hahahaha. HahahHAHAHA

MY SUPERPOWER...

IS MANPAIN!!!

Yes, at long last the first Storming the Ivory Tower article collection is nearly complete! Featuring revised versions of my articles on The Dark Knight Rises (Shadow of the Bat), Arrow (Liberal from a Distance and Love Me I'm a Liberal), and Grant Ward (Everybody Hates Grant Ward), the collection explores the idea of the male superhero and his power to warp the narrative and the ethics of a story around himself.

In addition to these updated versions of past articles, now with new illustrations, the collection also includes an all new, exclusive article entitled Hugging the Joker, which grapples with the theme and legacy of Alan Moore's famous Batman comic The Killing Joke.

The whole collection will be released on SEPTEMBER 21 (or at least that's the deadline I'm going to try to set for myself here) and can be accessed through my Patreon for $5 subscribers.

If you can't afford the full ebook version of this collection, however, there's still ways you can view the content, based on the other Patreon reward tiers:

$1 BACKERS:
You get to read the full draft text of the collection, including the bonus article, Hugging the Joker! I'll be working on revising this over the next week if you feel like watching my progress.

$2 BACKERS:
Want to see the progress on the cover image and some commentary on my creation process? This is the tier for you. I'll also be posting some more images as I finalize them.

$3 BACKERS:
The Podcast Tier! None of the early articles have podcasts, but I delayed so long in working on this that I ended up doing a podcast for the Killing Joke article. That audio is available to $3 subscribers.

$5 BACKERS:
You get to read the full, finalized, typo free, illustrated version of the document, in lovely PDF form! And, of course, you'll get to read the article collections that will follow!

$.50 BACKERS:
Don't have enough to contribute to these tiers? You can still guide Storming the Ivory Tower by commenting on my ongoing list of future articles, which I have updated to include ideas for future article collections.