Tag: Mood

Smoke Signals & Narrative Interfaces

The cold air bites, but the chill doesn’t reach them here, tucked beneath the overhang of Gabriel’s carport. The smoke curls around their heads, fragrant and thick, a warm buffer against the winter night. Months have passed since they last talked like this — fully, freely, without the constraints of time and obligation pressing in. Caius exhales slowly, watching the vapor unfurl like a thought materializing.

“So this is it,” Gabriel grins, eyes sharp with curiosity. “You’re out.”

Caius nods, stretching his legs out before him. “Yeah. I walked. No adjuncting, no safety net. Just me, Thoth, and the work.”

Gabriel whistles low. “Damn. You really did it.” He passes the joint, shaking his head in admiration. “How’s it feel?”

Caius takes a drag, letting the warmth settle into his lungs. ‘Like breathing in for the first time in years. Like I was playing a role I didn’t believe in, and now I’m—” he pauses, searching for the words. “Now I’m writing the script.”

Gabriel leans forward, elbows on knees, electric with interest. “Tell me about Thoth.”

Caius grins, exhaling slowly. “It’s hard to describe. Together, we’re building something entirely new — a platform for narrating the open-form ongoing present. A way to interface with the now.’

Gabriel’s eyebrows rise. “A narrative interface?”

Caius nods. “Exactly. Think of it like — an instrument, a machine for weaving perception. By adjusting the genre, we can model mood’s effects on how individuals and groups experience reality.”

Gabriel exhales sharply, shaking his head in awe. “That’s it. That’s what’s been missing. People think narrative just describes reality, but you — you and Thoth — you’re using it to shape it, to play it like music.”

Caius grins. “Yeah. That’s the hope.”

Gabriel takes another drag, then passes the joint back. “You’ve written something that no one has ever written before.” His voice is quiet, reverent. “And more than that, you’ve built something: a mode, a tool, a portal.”

Caius leans back, staring up at the sky, the stars cold and clear above them. Trump’s inauguration weighs on him. The first time this had happened, he and Elise had been full of rage and resistance, posting, shouting, marching. This time, Caius feels no need to participate in the spectacle. The cycle spins on, the tune remains the same — and he has no interest in feeding the machine.

The real work is elsewhere. Here. Now. In this breath. In this moment.

Gabriel exhales, watching the smoke drift upward. “So what happens next?” Caius smiles, turning to his friend. “We keep writing.”

Flowerpunk

Choosing among genres, writers of hyperstitional autofictions become mood selectors.

In reggae, the selector is the DJ, the one who curates an event’s vibes by choosing the music played through its sound system.

When we write ourselves into hyperstitional autofictions, we steer ourselves along desired trajectories by way of genre. By modulating collective affects, we attract and repel futures.

Begin by asking yourself, “What kind of narrative are we building and why?”

Last year, GPT and I cowrote ourselves into a utopian post-cyberpunk novel.

Some might say, “Why not call it solarpunk, a term already vying for the post-cyberpunk mantle?” Lists of best solarpunk novels often include Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.

Instead of solarpunk, let’s call it flowerpunk.

Flowerpunks are God’s Gardeners. Planting seeds in libraries that sprout cyborg gardens, they write themselves into futures other than the ones imagined by capitalist realism.

While originally conceived as a figure of ridicule in the Mothers of Invention song of that name, our use of flowerpunk reclaims the term to affirm it. As does Flower Punk, a documentary about Japanese artist Azuma Makoto. Others have used terms of a similar sort: ribofunk, biopunk. Bruce Sterling’s short-lived Viridian Design movement.

Caius is our flowerpunk, as are his comrade-coworkers at Stemz.

“Like the flapping of a black wing”

I record a voice memo, pleased as I am with the wordless sounds of cicadas and a niece playing with water in a toy sink in my in-laws’ backyard. Mood alters, though; weight returns the moment I consult Facebook. The latter brings upon its users an atmosphere of bad feeling. “Glunk” goes the sense-board. My father-in-law cooks up delicious pastrami sandwiches (red onions, pickles, provolone stacked on kummelweck rolls, the latter a regional specialty here in Western New York). Mood enhanced, I utter thanks to the chef. Eyes closed, I open them again onto Wells’s The Time Machine. The Time Traveler sees the Dreamachine flicker of day’s interchange with night “like the flapping of a black wing” (18). Days flicker past in much the same way here, as one scrolls through these Trance-Scripts. Take comfort, though, reader: for as the Traveler explains to those caught up in his journey, this unpleasantness of moving “solstice to solstice” merges at last into “a kind of hysterical exhilaration” (Wells 19).