Third eye
I started The Martian on the tube – it’s survival sci-fi, told as a diary. I’m a few in-story days in. Also, because my commute is long, I started playing the text-adventure-interactive-fiction Photopia after a tweet by @tomstuart and it’s all fast cuts - cinematic really - and my train pulled into my station just as I was typing, reacting to [redacted urgent scene].
Then two minutes later, walking on the street, my phone buzzed: It’s a notification for a fictional voicemail on the fictional phone belonging to a fictional person from The Thick of It. @losowsky turned me onto this app, Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone. I thought I’d played all the way through yesterday, but it turns out I’m still inside the drama.
Suddenly I’m intermezzo in three narratives simultaneously - all urgent in a time dimension that is moving forward only sporadically - plus IRL – I feel like an eye has opened in the back of my head and this is the feeling of looking into a dimension where I couldn’t even see blackness before, in a direction sideways to space, sideways to time.
Now here I am, on Mars, in London, with a lost phone, in London, under the hot sun by the pool with a drowning girl, in London, on a street now in a cafe now in an office at a desk, typing
I started The Martian on the tube – it’s survival sci-fi, told as a diary. I’m a few in-story days in. Also, because my commute is long, I started playing the text-adventure-interactive-fiction Photopia after a tweet by @tomstuart and it’s all fast cuts - cinematic really - and my train pulled into my station just as I was typing, reacting to [redacted urgent scene].
Then two minutes later, walking on the street, my phone buzzed: It’s a notification for a fictional voicemail on the fictional phone belonging to a fictional person from The Thick of It. @losowsky turned me onto this app, Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone. I thought I’d played all the way through yesterday, but it turns out I’m still inside the drama.
Suddenly I’m intermezzo in three narratives simultaneously - all urgent in a time dimension that is moving forward only sporadically - plus IRL – I feel like an eye has opened in the back of my head and this is the feeling of looking into a dimension where I couldn’t even see blackness before, in a direction sideways to space, sideways to time.
Now here I am, on Mars, in London, with a lost phone, in London, under the hot sun by the pool with a drowning girl, in London, on a street now in a cafe now in an office at a desk, typing