Brainstorming

Accounts are the mind killer. I don't really like posting on forums, I tend to obsess and find them unhealthy, but have been keeping up with everything. With that said, I've thrown so many ideas at Nate over the years that I figured I'd just collate them all here. (I have no set in stone plans on using most of these, I waive all rights to the ideas. All of them I find interesting and might do, but the ones marked with asterisks are the ones I personally feel a bit more wedded to and would prefer to take first crack at whenever I eventually get around to doing this.)

The classic: A story about a timeship's thought process, set inside a vector field. (*) Graph paper for the pages, most of the squares are arrows going in one of the cardinal directions, plus symbols for up or down. In addition you can come to 3d chunks of text in the vector field which decrypt into a word/phrase/sentence. There's a whole bunch more you can do with this format if you think about it for a bit.

Call one "Holography", also using graph paper (you probably need punctuation to go inside squares for this to work), if you treat your book as a rectangular prism/lattice with the graph paper, make it so there's a traversal of the exterior of the lattice that touches every square on the outside, forming a coherent story, and this story has the same basic plot as the 3 dimensional story you've written out normally. (Hard to explain in text, hard to do, but actually pretty easy to show with pictures.)

Trypophobia: Musings about the ontology of holes, and as the story goes on, negative spaces enter the text, either through white space or silence, depending on medium.

Two paired audios that focus on the same basic setting with vignettes from it (say, a battlefield), and there are punctuated periods of cacophony at the exact same time in each audio (say, cannon fire). These have near opposite amplitudes, and if you play the audios at the exact same time the cacophonous periods add together to play a new series of vignettes.

An ARG similar to the cipher hunt would be fascinating to do, to see if you could make this into a real story for people, telling it through carefully placed documents in rented houses, pay some actors to do certain things every night once the previous stage of the puzzle had been finished, have people film everything on their phones. More something for the BBC than anything. But there's real potential there.

Similarly, there's the obvious idea of rigging a livestream. Work with a streamer in advance to plan certain things over a period of time, plant people in chat to push the story along, maybe have them go outside and see weird stuff, or rig their room in some ways. The questions become which streamer, given their personality, audience demo, audience size, cost of doing this, etc. Non trivial, but I'm surprised the area has been explored so little.

A story about Gödel and time loops. (*) His paranoia would have to be handled very gently, but since he's in some ways the founder of time travel, it only seems fitting.

A video game/light novel(/dating sim style?) that focuses heavily on the abuses of power in esports as an industry, turning the trauma therein into psychological horror. Obviously heavily inspired by ddlc, but BELIEVE ME it would be its own thing and its own special brand of dark. (Anyone who wants to be angry for weeks should look into what happened to Remilia.) (*)

(For extra fun, I'd probably write that in renpy, which you could decompile, and I'd probably include a short story in the comments of the code. Have fun with Rule 3 on the wiki.)

Inconsistent Histories: A book that changes as you read it (ebook only, of course), the main character ends up dying, but if you check the drop down ToC, the names of the chapters are different from what they originally were. Going back to one of them puts you on a different path. (Progressing a chapter resets the ToC chapter names behind you. Maybe the ones in front of you too, might be a complete shuffle, not sure about that.) Obviously there are timey-wimey reasons for this, and the character keeps dying until you find the "good ending". (*)

Half baked ideas that are just thoughts that don't merit further comment: Maybe something on the ergodic hierarchy? Don't know near enough about this, fully in the first stages of thoughts here. Bombs that leave FP shadows instead of bomb shadows. Dark academia web comic focused on, say, a science school, with the Faction haunting it as a liminal presence.

-Naj