ITT: Authors who would browse Veeky Forums if they were born in the 90s

William Gibson

Man, I love Dostoevsky. This is such a nice painting of him

Tao Lin

It's nice and a little heart-breaking when you consider what he's been through. His skin and facial muscles are stretched so thin his head basically doesn't look any different from a skull.

Yeah. He doesn't look so bad here though

>"just know thyself" REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

hands down, dfw would have been a redditor

Aleister Crowley

Kafka. He already jerked off to hedgehog porn.

He does already, here's his email: [email protected]

HP Lovecraft would be the overlord of /pol/ and /r9k/

post something pynchon-esque

i think dfw would like the ability to post raw unfiltered and chaotic posts here on Veeky Forums. also he'd like the anonymity. Veeky Forums is just an overall badass that would appeal to dfw

He would be the one making all the *BRAAAAAAAAP* threads on /r9k/

dude... DFW plotted to kill the husband of a woman he was in love with... he aimed to impress her with IJ. He described himself as an "exhibitionist" in regards to his work. Franzen claims he was super self-absorbed was truly an asshole. He fucked his students in his class.

He would've hated the normies on Reddit

1.
I always wondered what Infinite Jest would have been like as a webpage or maybe even a visual novel. Maybe text-and-hyperlink-only or maybe not. I know I'm not the first person to suggest this but I don’t see the topic or related topics brought up very often.

In some ways DFW’s predicament reminds me of Edgar Varese, the composer, whose music needed the technology of audio recording that only became available shortly before his death. Unfortunately, as I see it, DFW never got to use his equivalent of the “tape recorder” before he died. Maybe if DFW hadn't demapped himself and had stuck it out through the changing of attitudes toward interactive media he would have really found his place in the sun. What if he had tried, for example, to write an RPG where digressions and are part and parcel ? I think he probably wouldn't have been able to solve the BIG video game issue of making conversations with NPCs verisimilitudinous for non-gamers and without being tastelessly self-aware (“har, har, we have to talk like this cuz we’re in a video game!”) but maybe more people would eventually be able to suspend this particular disbelief as more people played games as games and got used to dialog trees as natural-feeling storytelling elements. “Ask about this topic, oh, wait, let me tell you about this related topic. Select from one of these five topics and I’ll tell you about it” seems like a perfect format for DFW’s style.

The question minimally interactive-beyond-simply-reading sorts of books like Pale FIre or Hopscotch or IJ or (sorry) House of Leaves always raise for me is how much interactivity or non-text elements are required to make something non-lit? AT what do etchings, drawings, or cartoons make something into a graphic novel? How many photos does a book have to have before it is a "photo book?" How much interactivity before it's a "video game" and not a "visual novel.” Could someone write a masterpiece that requires reading the book during the performance of a soundtrack, like a hybrid novel-radio melodrama? How about having instructions to manually change the music whilst reading? What do you think the real reason is there haven’t been any great or even really good works written using web pages as a medium? A kinetic VN seems like a genre wherein it would be a trivial matter for a good author to completely crush it, world heritage masterpiece-makin’ wise, but even on relatively respectable must-read lists including Graphic Novels you won’t find anything that requires a computer.

2.
I think even something like “Visual Novel Shakespeare” could work well--you would have some elements of live performance combined with the ability to close-read. You could watch scenes in real-time with some kind of auto function that made it more like one of those “animated graphic novels (?),” or click line by line to get the feeling for lines while you look up stuff in the interactive “tips” feature. Isn’t it really just an extension of people naturally breaking their reading flow to go look something up, or , better yet, pausing or rewinding a movie to look something up or re-read subtitles or catch a background gag?

Disclaimer: Undergoing ketamine infusion therapy for depression so I might be thinking a little too positively. INB4 KYS.

Try playing Planescape Torment. Ketamine is legit as hell.

I nominate Diogenes. He'd be shitposting from the public library.

He almost would have assuredly not touched the video game industry with a million foot pole. However he for sure would have been addicted to wow at some point and probably could create the best rpg to ever exist. But video games go against every philosophy he had

Diogenes.

He'd be asking for alt-right recs every week.

Nabokov is the well read troll

...

proof

quintessential 3:00am lurker