For fall, break working on the database into smaller interconnected vignettes that build on each other. Possibly build a randomization system to cross reference these tropes with the Fussing about fiction returning from northern ontario and each other (but don't feel married to it.)

Narrative tropes

• unreliable narrator
• researchers opinions change over time, commenting on themselves Read the Dramatic 17th-Century Memoirs of Alice Thornton, Who Wrote Four Versions of Her Life Story
• researchers falling asynchronously in love with another, revealing the original narrator starts talking to them The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms by LITHOBREAKERS, Stanwixbuster, COMPUTERMILK
• researchers(entities in disguise) start talking back to you, asking for help, and releasing edit access (how games move us ref)
  • how do I make the player involved with this researcher? Love? intention to reach a shared investigation goal? Dire warnings of a future? They claim the were like you once. They were trapped and want help to be free. They don't want you to be similarly trapped. Maybe they tell you you need to feed it to appease it or it will take you. (But actually you are building the bridge with with it takes you.)
• an early chapter without interactivity or meta - pure lore
• prompt player to follow up ofln finding as much as they can about a specific researcher who's fate is hinted at. Balance abstraction (genderless, without physicality - you watch them loose their physicality and feel a certain way about jt) and specifics (time period, friends, job, disposition). How much do you invest in their handwriting and initials?
• researchers criticising the values/similar focus (the annals) of previous (thinking they missed important info, Athenian murders), affectionate teasing (shriek an afterward),
• player needs to heavily invest real identity into username (how?!)
• take identity away

database tropes

• Recognizing voices in metadata
• missing files, broken images. Data degredation like the Wayback machine
• connecting evidence (learning what initials correspond to which researcher - how to make this important?)
• Software starts bugging out in ways that feel overly anthropomorphized and person attacks
• Alternative font in an alien language that I invent?!
• Software support is useless, contact page has no actual contact page and just directs to an unhelpful FAQ
• update log with use IDs (limited to software, you see previous researcher uodatsles here. It logs your own. This is where you see what new hashes have unlocked. )
  • maybe there is a mysterious broken I'd chewing through previous edits
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mechanics I have available to me (probably)

• text formating
• CSS animations
  • typewriter effect
  • making the text overlap house of leaves style
  • making elements move or escape the mouse
• auto redirects (timed? Triggered?)
• taking over the mouse, probably?
• entries referencing each other (see also property, or can I make hyperlinks in entries themselves?)
• gifs with subtle animations (maybe sometimes on second viewing )
• changing images on second viewing so it seems like they're reacting to you
• changing user permissions
  • start - bookmarks and hexhash import
  • add subentry
  • edit entry (but someone else takes over when you try? That effect where you type but different words appear)
  • add new entry with media upload
  • animation of someone else using your user name
• hexhash unlock
• as much as possible, rather than having a million entries, make those entries have locked subentries to find. (Can I make them hunt through documents to find the hexhash?) Or change on second viewing
• make an alert system for non-hexhash new entries (pop up? Notification page? Eventually user gets access to changelog? With filter to see other active users with timestamp from users real-world system?)
• Make player sort table and having two entries line up

other notes

• make a hexhash generator because they're annoying
• map key/value system to hexhash so they're more readable to me, I can name them after story choke-points
• make it a drop-down rather than typed
• make a page like the media list so I can see how they're grouped right now
• property with gillian-readable title that is different from researcher readable title
• Gaiman Text based game engine and programming language - probably easier to program from scratch at this point, but use this for aesthetic and inspo
• earlier entries are all seeded with leads to follow each storyline. the "ending" storyline is seeded at the beginning but cannot be fully unlocked without others
• instead of "available on start" assign "starter hexhash" that can be used for different text builds.

Silly

• I want to animate the database building itself with little animated hands dragging around metadata, assembling itself data by data
• Animated database as ritual summoning device - each brick of metadata placed just so in a pentagram or other esotericly pointed symbo
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Tech of writing sept 26