Phew! This was a big one to produce! Massive thanks to Fifth, who helped inspire this weirdness of an article, Mors and Gre for the creative input and the excellent images, as well d4rkseid, Vizlox, Esterified and KindlyTurtleRock for turning this from a very long and very dry draft into something… hopefully less dry and long.
stop with the fucking aesthetic text retards
3 because I love the concept, but the execution is subpar imo.
What needs fixing? I polished the shit out of this one so I'm prepared to polish more.
I feel like the image captions and reference to the effects are just too colloquial… I get that that was prolly intentional, but it doesn't work for me.
…but they're quotations from people trapped in a dream world. I just don't understand how they wouldn't be colloquial.
Even though I really liked the concept I don't find the entry too interesting. Feels like it needs more exploration logs or info about the anomaly.
It's good yes but can be better.
+3
A rather neat analysis of detachment and internet aesthetics. I came into this thinking it'd be one long vaporwave joke, and came out thinking about how right you got everything.
V o n P i n c i e r s t o p b e i n g s u c h a g o o d a u t h o r +5
blabbo
RPC-956-2 have been observed performing actions resembling conversations, physical disputes, consumption of food and water, and even procreation.
Mildly unclinical. The Authority has seen to much weird shit that nothing surprises them anymore. Using "even" indicates that the item in question is more remarkable than the previous ones. There is no need for this.
best we can do to approach its surreal nature is to remain objectivity
Replace with "objective" or "remain in objectivity."
My main issue with this RPC that it slaps you in the face with it and doesn't let us think about the elements that would make it up. This is very unsatisfying for me. This could be handled by not making it a carbon copy of a vaporwave landscape, and to instead let it retain elements that are 𝐚 𝐞 𝐬 𝐭 𝐡 𝐞 𝐭 𝐢 𝐜 in nature yet make up new elements, which is another part of the problem. While the idea of a vaporwave world is cool, it's uncreative. There's a lot of new things you can do with this, and I feel as though this article doesn't do it justice.
The exploration log is pretty unprofessional and is where this definitely kills it for me. The explorer is too pretentious about what he sees. It seems to serve as "Ooh! Look at this!" and for the most part is useless. We know about what's in there by what you've described in the description, so let us imagine it for ourselves.
For now +2 but I'd definitely reconsider and would love to see this in another take.
oof
I'll fix those errors accordingly, thank you! As for the "copy-paste" nature of the article's imagery, that was kind of intentional, because the vaporwave aesthetic is very much based around the recycling of certain common aesthetic motifs and elements.
I'm also not sure what you mean by the exploration log being unprofessional- this is an environment where human beings naturally become extremely detached and dissasociated, hence the looser tone than the rest pf the piece. And what do you mean by pretentious, exactly?
By pretentious, I mean this exactly:
That fear, that stomach-dropping horror. It's past.
I don't feel hungry or thirsty or anything. I think… I think that even if I did feel it I wouldn't care, anyways.
Remember this is an Authority operative, their work, especially when they're venturing into an anomalous plane of existence, is serious. The way Mackenzie Anders words his statements come across as too emotional, which I'm guessing is deliberate, as only emotionally troubled individuals have a high chance of entering into this world. So then my criticism is that the exploration log, more than anything, serves to describe the Researcher's emotional state rather than explore the RPC and for that I think that an exploration log wouldn't be needed.
What if we had a journal attatched to the article that describes the Researcher getting progressively more and more reverse-homesick, and keeps trying to desperately get back into RPC-956? I think this would be a really good execution in terms of illustrating the emotional detatchment of people entering the RPC, and there's many different cool ways I feel that this can be executed. , so much so that it's making me foam at the mouth
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