Tales From The Town #50: Stop Motion

On his desktop a spaceship. In the spaceship a man. And against a backdrop of stars, formed from dust on an old black t-shirt pinned to his wall, this spaceship moves slowly through space, one photograph at a time, taken painstakingly over hours, days, weeks of his life, waiting there on his camera to be assembled into motion.

Animation was as slow as David’s life. Played back, weeks reduced to seconds, it gave the impression of motion. But in fact there was no movement at all.

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Notes:

1. Written in May 2020
2. Almost a year before I actually started stop motioning
3. Unstoppably

Tales From The Town #49: Shoelaces

“Shoelaces are so stupid,” Claire said.

“What’s wrong with shoelaces?” Ethel asked. “They’re better than velcro.”

“Hey,” Tina said, as she velcro’d her shoes shut. “What’s wrong with velcro?”

“Velcro comes from space,” Daniel said. “It’s made by aliens!”

“No it’s not,” Claire said. “Anyway, velcro’s just as stupid as shoelaces. You don’t get socklaces, do you? You don’t have to velcro your leggings up? They’re rubbish! Why don’t they just make boots that fit your feet?”

There was not a single person alive who could have adequately answered her question. Nor was there anyone who dared try.

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Notes:

1. Written on June 24th, 2021

Tales From The Town #48: The Door In The Wall, or The Worth Of Dreams

The first time Yulia saw the door was on her walk to work one morning, in the middle of the old Roman wall that ran through the centre of the town. It had never been there before. But there it was, locked and closed and as solid and real as the wall itself. She couldn’t stop thinking about it all day, this out of place door in the middle of that wall. When she came home that evening, it was gone.

The second time she saw it, it was down near the abandoned pub, in the wall circling the beer garden. A different wall, but the same door. It was unmistakeable. She was on the bus this time, and caught only a glimpse of it, but she was sure it was open now, not fully, but slightly ajar at least, a shaft of light shining though the gap and illuminating the pavement with an ethereal glow.

Then the bus rattled on towards its destination, and all Yulia was left with was the memory of it on her retinas, a patch of shimmering blue superimposed over the dismal and the dull of the town in winter.

The third time the door was on the other side of the street, opposite the shop, in the ruins of the old gallery, directly in her line of sight for the whole of the day. It was wide open, and Yulia could see through to what lay beyond. And what she was a world of wonders, a shifting infinity of possibilities, each one more enticing than the last, more beautiful than any heaven.

Only the queue of her customers, which stretched twice round the shop and back down the street, kept her from getting up from her chair and crossing the street and stepping through that door and never coming back.

Yulia knew it was all a dream, but that hardly mattered. She’d seen it now. Seen through and beyond to something else, something other than this. All she had to do was was wait. Wait for the door to return, for her to take her chance. There were other worlds than these.

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Notes:

1. Written between June 7th and June 14th, 2021
2. The title is taken from an HG Wells short story
3. And the last line is taken from The Gunslinger by Stephen King
4. But the bits in between are my own

Aaaaaaaargh! (a game)

This was made using the Pulp game editor for Playdate. You can download the game below, to play either through the Pulp app emulator or the playdate itself (maybe – I have no idea when they’re released or how they work).

Download: aaaargh (zip file)

To install it you’ll need to extract and import either the json file (which I think is the source code) into the pulp app, or load the .pdx folder onto your playdate (if anyone actually has a Playdate). You might need to make an account first to use the Pulp editor, and there’s import buttons on the main page that should hopefully work with these files.

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Notes:

1. Made in March 2022
2. The sounds/soundtrack are terrible, for which I apologise
3. But they were the best I could do.
4. It is supposed to be intentionally irritating.
5. But the sound on this video is somehow broken even more.
6. I have no idea how to capture system sounds using quicktime, so had to record the audio through the internal microphone, the noise cancelling algorithms of which seem to have eaten half of the static and most of the beeps.
7. Sorry about that.