#ergodic literature

[kittykat-pikachu]

list of things about mussed up houses

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski

skinamarink by kyle edward ball

the house in the ocean by mister manticore

myhouse.wad by veddge

this house has people in it by alan resnick (possible? its more like the people are the strange thing)

monster house by gil kenan (maybe not messed up in the right way for this list)

burning down the house by the talking heads (only in passing)

additions:

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson (book)

the haunting of hill house by mike flanagan (tv adaptation of the book)

rose red by stephen king

vivarium by lorcan finnegan

changing planes by ursula k. le guin (not a house, but thematically close)

charlotte markham and the house of darkling by michael boccacino

slade house by dave mitchell

little, big by john crowley

the inner room by robert aickman

phantom architecture by phillip wilkinson

bite size terrors: erobos heaven by anoverthinker (seems like possibly the house isnt whats strange? but i dont know for sure i havent played it)

anatomy by kitty horrorshow

childhood homes (and why we hate them) by qrowscant

the house next door by annie rivers siddon

white is for witching by helen oyeyemi

haunted by poe (album counterpart to house of leaves??? holny crap)

the house with a clock in its walls by john bellairs (also has a movie adaptation)

p.t. by hideo kojima

coraline by neil gaiman (more like the creature is making the house messed up but yeah ill count it)(EDIT: okay yeah that house IS just messed up. forgot the beldam didn't make the other house)

starling house by alix harrow

the witch's house by fummy

house (hausu) by nobuhiko obayashi

the house is alive and the house is hungry by the paper chase

my house walk-through by nana825763

control by sam lake

house of bones by jeffery scott lando

lungbarrow by marc platt

if anyone knows of other things that fit this niche, any type of media, feel free to add on. i'll edit and add it to the original post. i just really like this specific niche

thank you to @bas-fish, @eggmixercortex, @ohiotpke, @posteriorpeasantpresents, @hadoom, @dougielombax, @lite-weaver, @mimillion, @elvriskastello, @apotheoseity, @hauntedhousez, @sophiewooloo, @jumbledthemes for contributing :3

i should sort this + add links putting that on my to-do list

[fiddlesqueak-fables]

Hello, I’m here to advertise my Victorian/Gilded age inspired medical-horror artwork on my Etsy!

I hand-crafted and fully illustrated a short story in the form of an 1880’s medical journal, and it’s now available as a scanned PDF for only $5. If stories aren’t your thing, there are prints and stickers of the various illustrated elements as well!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/FiddlesqueakFables

[zetexkindasucks]

i fucking love house of leaves because zampano can be rambling about the most confusing pretentious shit ever and truant will hit you with the

³⁷ damn that's crazy. wanna hear about this hot stripper that's like super hot

[shiftwux]

a few weeks ago i gave everyone on my twitter, tumblr and instagram the chance to post whatever they wanted.

the only thing that came out of it was 20 ish pages of ergodic literature for the soul

https://shiftwux.itch.io/drunkmoms

[lesbiassoon]

Rate my beach read

(There’s a non 0 chance I’m concussed rn)

[quicksilverlightning]

I respond to lots of stimuli, but these will get my attention immediately.

[situationlately]

Random smattering of some of my favourite books with reds in the cover art

[talefoundryshow]

This week, on Nebula:

[c4tb1rd]

The autistic urge to create self-published ergodic literature trans space horror as a series of zines with interactive elements

Anyway I’ve been researching how to make commercial-looking spaceship maps for the last thirty minutes and I think I’m gonna need to get real familiar with vector programs

[vforvalensa]

It’s like a house of leaves in here

[te-pu-si-ti]

Punchdrunk as hypertext

I am in the greenhouse room, and I clutch at my heart. What I see before me is a person in black latex receiving a drug on their tongue like holy communion. There are only two characters in the room: Kampe, and their dealer. But what I experience is much greater, because I can hear the music echoing: the music signalling that on the other side of the city, a city has fallen and a princess is dead, hanging up above, bare-chested and bloodied for all to see.

I remember her. It was her birthday, we danced with her, she stumbled into the arms of her lover.

I know this from an hour ago, before time reset.

I am in the flower shop, and I gasp. A tango is playing through the tinny speaker of the radio. The shopkeeper picks up a bouquet - her bouquet - and he twirls around, holding it in his arms, dancing a tango with a prop that is the start of Persephone's story, to the music that is the near-climax of her story.

I know this from months before, because I have been here before but it was different. It's different every time. There's so much to take in, and I have to choose who I see and what I focus on, and the context I bring with me is constantly developing.

That's a familiar criticism. Too many choices, no coherent story.

But Pope (2009) isn't a criticism of a Punchdrunk masked show - it's a criticism of a HTML novella, These Waves of Girls, hypertext, a story that you wade into by clicking through links. A story that leads you down many different paths, depending on how you choose to follow them.

Don't worry if you get lost - you're already lost. Embrace your curiosity. Turn your fear into desire. Fortune favours the bold.

The link is the most important new form of punctuation since the comma... Links make manifest the way texts relate to other texts, the way they structure themselves, and the way they restructure our thinking.

A reference to another scene, a repeated movement hearkens back to something you witnessed minutes ago, hours ago, weeks ago. A prop moves across buildings, touched by many hands along the way. Characters intersect, and you take a different path, thrown into another story before you reunite for a finale.

You ever gone down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Clicking link after link, opening up a dozen new tabs, somehow finding your way from Scooby-Doo to Leukemia to learning the Yupik word for bread?

Her Story is an FMV video game where you uncover the story by searching a database of video clips for keywords. As you search for clues, things that don't make sense stick in your mind, because they might be important later. A new piece of information can cast something you've already seen in a completely new light.

You can stay with one thread, or you can let your curiosity guide you, bouncing around from one storyline to the next. It might not make sense at first, seeing everything out of order - but then as you make sense of it, you will form those connections, perhaps even more strongly than you would have done if you had watched a linear story that you didn't have to work for.

...the spaces of reading and writing shift in a hypertextual environment and the reader is required to adopt a mode of engagement in terms of an unstable textual terrain, which involves them in productive and creative processes as well as receptive ones...

"Because everything is constructed, everything becomes significant, in the artistic context everything ordinary becomes extraordinary." - Sam Booth

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse is a collection of digital and physical ephemera - notes, photos, lyrics, scribbles, all telling the story of this man you knew as Uncle Buddy, who has now died. You leaf through them, choosing what to pay attention to, taking away what you deem significant, building an image based on what he left behind.

 It does have an option to spell out the answer to the riddle if you want to skip that, but the significance might be lost in the process. ...

Description of Tamara, an example of theatre dubbed 'hyperdrama', theatrical hypertext.

"Punchdrunk's Sleep No More is an astonishing production that does nearly everything I had imagined hyperdrama could achieve, and much that I had assumed it could not." ... "The experience works here, but it is going to be different for everyone. How many people get to see Mrs. DeWinter’s scene? Of those, how many are in the bar when the band strikes up Paper Moon ? How many get the Woyzeck allusion the next day, or ever? This is the nature of the medium."

Seriously, read this article by Mark Bernstein.

 It’s not a game. Nothing you (or they) can do can prevent the fall of Troy or its terrible aftermath. Yet your choices (and chance) matter, and your reading of Those Trojan Girls is likely to differ from any other reading.

(hypertext is also, sadly, ephemeral, linked to its time and place. The above linked work is less than a decade old but I doubt I'd find what I need to read it, the right software and the right hardware of the right version with all the right features. Digital rot everywhere. Who has a floppy drive anymore? Who has Flash anymore? Just like nobody will experience The Burnt City anymore. Just like, soon, nobody will experience the McKittrick Hotel anymore.)

My first show: I see a man swinging upside down, hanging from the ceiling. The image haunts me. I do not know him, nor do I know the two onlookers. But it stays with me.

Many months later, I see him again, and he is an old friend - his name is Laocoön, a seer, and he is burdened with a prophecy from Apollo. Cassandra looks on, distraught, while the vengeful god puppets him. He is showing her the fate of her sister.

I remember her. It was her birthday. We danced with her. I watched her die, over and over and over. I remember every moment, every branching path, every intersection, and she isn't here, but she's all around us.

"There is no longer one author but two, as reader joins the author in the making of the text" - Jay David Bolter, "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space" "Go back into the light. Remember what you've seen... We love you so deeply. It's nothing without you." - Lily Jo Ockwell as Persephone, September 24, 2023

Lily photo by @rhianbwatts

[squipedmew]

A story about a man named Lee Grier-Neri, and what happens when his shadow begins to speak to him.

hey guys. i just published the first chapter of my new webcomic called PLACEBO PLACEBO. if you like psychological horror or ergodic literature then i'd suggest giving it a read and passing it around. (i'd really appreciate it.)

[skarnaes]

Non-euclidean geometry in media is one of the most fascinating things to me. I remember playing games like Antichamber and The Stanley Parable when I was younger and I only now realize how much of an impact they had on my younger, sponge-like brain. There's a feeling akin to a fourth wall break when reality itself breaks before you, you cannot rely on the comfort of knowing not only what will happen, but can happen next. It oddly resembles the feeling of listening to music outside of 12-tone equal temperament, especially if you're like me, and has spent years listening and studying to music inside this one system. Using a medium to its full potential, to the point where you feasibly cannot recreate said art in any other way. Books like House of Leaves are a perfect example of 'media that cannot be recreated in any other form'. It is a popular form of ergodic literature; a book whereas effort is required to traverse through pages to get the full picture of the story. There are pages where the text will suddenly be backwards, form shapes, etc. The format of the text will physically bend to act as a metaphor for what the characters in the book are feeling/what is happening to them. Without explaining the whole plot of the book to ya; there is a part in the book where someone is stuck in an endless labyrinth, and just for curiosities sake decides to punch through a wall. As a direct result of this, the next few pages in the book quite literally have a hole in them, showing the text that was there a few pages earlier. It's even mirrored on the other side of the page.

(Pictured: House of Leaves, the page I just explained to you. The blue square in the middle is the "hole" in the text. Image from CloudCuckooCountry's video about ergodic literature, where he talks about this exact thing).

Of course, I cant talk about meta media without mentioning liminal spaces and The Backrooms... There isn't much to say other than that this sense of unease seem to be a universal feeling. Many of us growing up in the 2000s can faintly remember being, or atleast seeing a place like a park, a long hallway, a mall etc. Viewing these pictures—which to some degree remind us of our childhood—in a distorted manner not only tugs at our nostalgia but also feeds into our subconscious fear of the uncanny valley. Our new generation is obsessed with nostalgia, so it's no wonder this "meta-genre" of horror is so popular, with things like Gemini Home Entertainment, Mandela Catalogue and so on. Gen Z is widely considered an experimentational generation, with the global normalization of the internet and social media becoming much more prevalent in our daily lives. At a time where we are spoonfed all sorts of both real and fake news from all over the world at all times, it's no wonder most would rather go back to a time where you weren't always pressured to stay connected. Anyways.. dunno how my small ramble about non-euclidean geometry in media turned into me writing about gen z and nostalgia. I'm gonna go back to being inactive now.. (_ _ ") .. Zzzz

[flandersno1shipper]

For fans of decoding indecipherable shit, a little thing

My first shot at trying something similar to ergodic literature. I've been wanting to try something like this for a while and inspiration suddenly hit after a "Education Philosophy" lesson in university so I quickly drabbled some drawings and turned it into a pdf. Its quite possibly very simple and dumb but I hope you can enjoy it.

[mothicalspoken]

does ANYONE know the book where it's about a man who died in his apartment and he really liked jigsaws and each chapter goes through another apartment in the apartment building and you don't have to read it in a linear fashion, and it's also kind of old? like 1980's old??? the entire introduction is about jigsaws?

i was looking for ergodic literature and found it on archive.org but never favorited it so now it's gone and i still wanna read it but I can' t find it

[adornesibley]

A good work colleague of mine has put up a Kickstarter for a sick looking puzzle adventure game with a thick physical manual for the spaceship you’re aboard and an app where you apply the things you’re learning there to fix problems on the ship.

I immediately backed it on the digital tier (as downunder shipping costs are brutal) but I highly recommend a physical copy of you’re in Canada or State-side.

Make sure to go wish them luck and consider backing them! They’ve got a ways to go, but this project has a hell of a lot of potential~