We had a good setup at this point, and repeated and refined what we learned from the first audio drama. By project four it had become routine.

First of, we did another project for the birthday boy who get the movie done for him a few years back. At this point it's 2019, and we had finished university and we're living in different parts of Europe, some of us even across the world.

I think the reason I wanted to make this happen, was because I really missed the family I had during these wonderful but brief five years we had spent so many days together. Making one of these projects was bringing back some of the magic from these days. We work together, I hear a lot more from everyone, and we usually have a meet where we all get together and listen to the final production.

It didn't matter if I was depressed or not feeling well. When it came to the scripts, I gave it my all. I got excited about all the dumb things I wrote, and could my ~~willing subjects~~ friends to say. I was feverishly looking forward to every cut and work in progress that Lucas send me when he had finished it. And the day we showed it off to everyone was a happy one, no matter the other circumstances in my life.

We did the one in 2019 which was already a lot longer than the one we did in 2016, and then the last one we did for someones wedding in 2022.

After that, there was nothing. The wedding of one our friends felt like a chapter had closed for good. The good days were over, and no matter how much silly garbage I wriote and have people act out, they won't come back.

We all had jobs, were in relationships, were engaged or were already married the following years. I got busy with my own relationship. My drive and motivation plummeted over the next years as my dissassociation get getting stronger. I had convinced myself that this childish stuff was all behind me now. I am living the serious adult life now, and if I wanted to make something new it had to be more mature, less silly, the humour had to be refined and a million other reasons why this was just too much work for me.

They were precious memories we can look back upon, and talk about whenever we meet.

And anyways: who am I? Just some run-of-the-mill-guy (which was still my belief at the time). What would make my words interesting enough for anyone to want to read them? No. I enjoyed writing, but I didn't believe it was worth doing if no one ever read it.

But Cass, you interrupt. Didn't you say the other day, that it doesn't matter to you if you scream into the void?

Yes. I did. Since back then there are a few things that changed. And some of it was hard to admit to myself, but it broke down so many walls and barriers in my head, that it was absolutely worth it.

I transitioned. This is the most important thing I did to helo me break this blockage. I live true to myself. I don't feel like a passenger in my own life. The words I speak are mine, they are authentic, and they are not longer influenced by what would be expected of me by others. Being able to speak from the heart is a blessing, and I wish for anyone to be able to express themselves in that way.

Second, before I transitioned I desperately tried to fill the gaping void in myself. It's not easy to say, but I wanted to become famous. A person people recognize on the street. I thought if I have manage that, I will have my purpose in life, and I will finally feel fulfilled. The big issue here is abviously that one does not simply become famous because she wishes to be, and also having any lack of motivation, sense of self-worth to even start anything that could lead to it.

So it stayed a longing. SOmething that was always my masterplan to get myself puzzled together, and something that I could start if I only got a little bit better menal health wise. That never happened.

Lastly, there was a feeling inside me, that told me that I did not have enough human experience to be able to write authentic character or stories. Before I met my partner, I always thought: I have never experienced love in a relationship, how can I ever hope to write something with such a gap in my human experience. Later this feeling expanded, and I realize now that it came from growing dissaociation. Feeling less and less like a human, being content, having fun, loving and being loved but never fully complete, always chasing that elusive solution that would make me finally understand why I feeling so different than all the other people around me.

In March I stopped digging in this pit, climbed out and started filling it with cement. Shovel by shovel. And I feel like writing now. Not for the sake of fame or reaction (not that I wouldn't love if people got enjoyment out of my work), but because I take joy in writing. I laugh when I think I wrote a very funny passage I note down ideas, I create characters with big personalities, and I am slowly finding my style.

What are the plans now? Well. I did want to novelize the scripts from the audioplays, and I actually started doing it. You can look at it here.

While writing that first chapter, I realized how much I would have to change about these texts, how many jokes were references that no one would get and that some characters (like a german gangster tha uses english envery two words and german-fies them) would not work at all translated.

And besides, why should I walk the beaten path. These scripts will always be there if I ever want to work with them. I think it's high time I do try to write something a bit longer. I have a few ideas, and I will throw stuff at the wall until something sticks. Just because it is fun.

That all being said, I wish I could make another movie at some point, but that's an ambition for another time.

-- Cass

Lucas helmed the documentary about me, organized basically everything around the movie shoot and did the whole cutting by himself. So I thought it was only fair for him to be the next victim/recipient of whatever we could cook up. Since we absolutely could not pull off the miracle of getting the band back together for another movie shoot, nevermind the fact that I could not do half the things Lucas did on the technical side, I had to look for alternatives that did not require all of our physical presence.

I made a grave mistake.

To this day, it's the one project that we keep hidden and stored in a safe place where it can't hurt anyone, like a barrel full of radioactive material in a deep, dark cave. An unholy amalgamation of cringe and madness that drives anyone insane who comes into contact with it. Should anyone ever get ahold of it, their soul shall be forever tainted, excluding them from ascending to paradise or descending to hell. Forever trapped in purgatory, forced to relive the cringe time and time again.

What could possibly be so powerful as to cause this curse upon mortal and immortal beings alike?

We made a mixtape with covers sung by us.

I cannot and do not want to go into more detail, for the mere sight of the zip file on my hard drive sends ice-cold shivers down my back.

But let this be known: there are at least three physical CD copies that we gave to random people in a bar on the evening of the release. If these cursed artifacts are still around or have since been destroyed, I do not know. I pray for anyone who might stumble upon them.

If you happen to find them:

• Do not under any circumstances listen to it.

• Do not look upon your reflection on the disc.

• Find your nearest active volcano and cast the disc into it.

Let us try to forget, and continue.

We wanted to do another project. But we still had the issue that it was basically impossible to find a schedule for a dozen people for another movie shoot. We really caught lightning in a bottle the first time around.

We had also tried to include some special effects in the movie and ended up cutting the scenes completely. It was too ambitious; we did not have the space to film in front of a proper green screen, nor did we have the skills to pull it off and make it look at least good enough.

Still, I wanted the next project to be bigger in scope. Leaving behind the mundane streets of the city where we studied and taking the protagonists of the next story for a grander adventure.

Filming everything in rooms of our parents' places, around the uni campus and in the city itself was fun, and it was practical to save time. It gave everything a recognizable charm for us. It also made some scenes very absurd, like the detective's office basically being a children's bedroom converted to an office. Why did we choose that? Because it had a lot of books in the background, which seemed like somthing a private investigator would have in his office, and we didn't have better alternatives.

We wanted bigger, did not have the tools for that, and we still wanted loads of people to participate. We needed a way to expand the scope without relying on visuals, and a way for everyone to contribute regardless of physical presence.

And thus, we found the medium for the next three projects: audio dramas.

It was perfect. It gave me complete creative freedom because we only had to describe the situations, have the characters react to them, throw in some sound effects and music, and the listeners' imagination would fill in the blanks.

It also did not require the actors to be physically present. If they could record scenes together, that would be great, but we could have everyone record their lines and put them together afterwards.

We were initially a bit worried that the dialogue would sound unnatural that way. But once we got the first recordings in, and the scenes ready, all our worries were lifted. Everyone seemed to have loads of fun with it, putting their own little spin on the characters I wrote and giving it their all. I had an idea and an image of the characters in my mind when I wrote it, but this made them really come to life!

As far as I remember, this was the last time Lucas wrote any scenes directly instead of just giving general input. I think at that time we really found our rhythm and understood each other's boundaries in the process.

I didn't mention it in the last post, but after three days of filming, running around and me being the annoying goofball I can be, we needed space and did not talk or communicate for a week before we started on the cut of the movie. We just needed the space.

We released it on the evening of the birthday celebration. It was a bit weirder sitting in a circle and listening to an audio drama than it was to watch a movie together, but we enjoyed ourselves.

We had found it. The perfect medium for us. So we made another two. Each one substantially bigger and longer than the one before.

There is a good reason I am not getting into the plots much: I have recovered the original scripts from my Keeper of Backups, and am really tackling the task of transcribing them into proper little novellas.

I will add some commentary to each chapter, and I'll be posting about it here whenever I have some work done on it. Which could be very, very soon.

The good thing about the stories being complete is that I can release them chapter by chapter without worrying about planning anything out. Not like I did that in the first place. I am 100% a pantser. This led to me writing myself into a dead end a few times, but the sheer absurdity of where I took the stories really forgave the deus ex machinas I pulled out of my ass a few times.

In the next and final part, we will look into the last two projects, and talk a bit about the ambitions I had for them.

-- Cass

Back to the topic. At some point, they really wanted a TV to watch some stream in the garage, so I obliged. Then they needed a DVD player. I only understood why when they handed me a case with my face on it. They all got together and made a documentary about me. Every. Single. Person. Took some time out of their lives to talk a bit about me and share some anecdote. Not to mention all the time it took to organize and produce all of it. Even though it's all part of my pre-transition life, just like a few very special moments with my partner, I really felt seen at that point. I was touched.

And I took it as a personal challenge.

When the next big birthday celebration came closer almost ten months later, me and my friend Lucas got together with a lot of wine and put together a script for a movie. It was awesome. We had a lot of fun. Since the birthday kid could not participate in the movie, and I didn't just want to do another documentary, we made it a little crime thingy. He was kidnapped (which is why he was never in the movie), his friends were looking for him, and with the help of a grumpy detective and his sidekick (played by yours truly), they managed to deus-ex-machina the whole thing by using the turn-the-time-back-machine, which is completely different than a time machine, to return to a point before the kidnapping and make sure it never happened in the first place.

It was full of dumb references to our own friend group and lame visual gags, but mostly there was a lot of heart. Everyone gave it their all. We shot the whole thing over two days just before Christmas, two months before the party, spent some time editing, and then Lucas and me circlejerked for a few weeks among us about what fucking geniuses we are and how good this thing is.

Spoiler: It really was not worth the hype.

So when the day came, we had about 30 people in a small 15m² studio. It was Lucas' place, and it was like the HQ for our group.

Also, the shower was next to the kitchen. I just find that remarkable.

So we had a beamer, not much space, and the movie was a hit. Everyone loved it, we laughed, the birthday kid couldn't believe it, and the whole evening was a shitload of fun.

Lucas and I had tasted blood. And it didn't lead to one more project, it led to four, of which the last one was over 2 hours long. We made a little coherent universe out of all of it, and to this day, it's probably the work I have put in the most effort into.

Something I always wanted to do is take the original scripts and turn them into readable stories, obviously with some names, locations, and other identifying things changed, because I really would like to share it, but firstly, the original stuff is all in German, and there is no way anyone (especially me, since it's all pre-transition Cass) is comfortable having their face and voices on the net.

I think I did write some jokes that have merit without the reference, and towards the end I really tried more and more to make it generally funny. I would love for this to be available for me to share. Might be a good project for the coming weeks.

Next time, we'll discuss the next two projects, a mixtape and an audioplay.

Have a good one!

-- Cass

Hypernet Explorer

I saw the trailer and thought for the first few seconds that it's a space exploration game. Now it's 2D. Wait, now it's 3D. Okay, so it mixes both? Cool idea, what else is there? Okay, yeah, you can land on planets and explore, it's what I thought it is. Ah, the mining in space is in 3D again. And that's a Dyson sphere, and that's - a character profile of Bill Clinton - level 1 bard. What.

Now we are riding bikes on an inhabited planet. Now the game looks like HD2D from TEMU. Why does it say Paris 100km on the bottom?! You can ride cars too. Oh, and it's also Minecraft. There is fishing, shooting bugs with rifles, and - IS THAT TETRIS?! Oh, and horse racing, why not? Someone answered the question "What is your game about?" with "Yes."

I checked the Steam page, because I literally had no idea what was going on anymore. I quote from the description:

Hypernet Explorer is an immersive-sim roguelike set in a weird and alternate 2001, where the Y2K bug shattered reality and erased most modern technology, that is slowly being rebuilt using magic and the occult. 

Form a party to explore a 92 floor skyscraper that barely holds the cosmos together or just get lost in alternate activities; manage a cursed pizza place, become a certified tarot reader,  date yourself from another plane of existence, start your own space program, get filthy rich by manipulating the soul market and... go bowling with your beloved cousin.

Every boundary that once separated religion, science, finance and magic is now obsolete so... do what thou wilt.

And that is only the start. It's an immersive sim with basically everything in it. Go read the rest for yourself. It's the kind of madness that intrigues me greatly. It's available on Steam to Wishlist: Hypernet Explorer.

La-Hee

I have been playing a lot of FFXIV again. And have been reminded of this brilliant shitpost by composer Masayoshi Soken. This was at the Fanfest 2021, which was sadly set in an empty hall because COVID was still going on. This man was fighting for his life against cancer only shortly before, shows up, drops this masterpiece, and leaves.

It just makes me smile. Please enjoy.

Sterling engine powered computer

This such a neat project. And he doesn't just show off the machine itself, but basically all the tools he used (and made), as well as how all the components work. Go check it out and leave a sub, and like!

Channel 5 on the rise of the AFD in Germany

Well. This one hits hard. I don't want to comment much on this. I am pretty sure you can guess where I stand on this. It's heartbreaking. Please watch and share it around.

Okay, that is it for this week, I have only had the idea to do this today. So there isn't much. I'll make sure to make more notes this week.

-- Cass