Hey, this Sunday, Lee Pembleton and Alex Lukas will be performing in their band My Daddy Ate My Eyes. The show is in the Oakland hills in the yard of two other 23E members, Ali Pembleton and Terry Mason.

Today in the space of a minute I received

an approval email from google maps for Site 0001: Bledsoe

Unearthed Arcana, an AD&D guide to help me build my first DM world in 30 years

Judas Crossing, a role playing module which two friends from my teen years created. I am one of the townsfolk players can run into.

So, web-acknowledgment of 23E’s world building project, EbM; a role playing world building manual; and a minor role in a built world.

SWOON

My Special Porpoise, Lee and Phil’s project, is moving closer to a televisual reality.
For MSP, we audio record thirteen 50 minute episodes of a cable television series. These sets of thirteen (two recorded thus far, a third going into the studio in July) constitute all of the sound, diegetic and non-diegetic, for the show. The only sound they lack is dialogue. Our goal is to get these sounds into the hands of a producer or writer who will then create a script and series to fit them, for eventual airing on TV. We think of it as creating a serial backwards, in some sense. That is, instead of a script, then shooting, with foley and soundtrack at the end, we provide the sonic trappings at the start. Some gifted writer or producer then spirits out the story we are telling, and sculpts the dialogue and visuals to the sound cues.
You can hear Episode One of Season One here.
And I mention all of this, because a friend of mine in Venice, CA, is a producer. He has a few samples of the first season. And is showing them to a filmmaker this week.
Cross your fingers!

An old realm, the city was founded when the first dreamer slipped into slumber. None now remember whether this dreamer was god or animal; where in time/space it resided. But that first night that it closed its eyes, or whatever senses might be analogous, and slept and first dreamt, it dreamt of this place. Later other dreamers came. And eventually every dreamer dreamt of the city, though, as it was often observed by the dreamers of skill who could remain in the realms of slumber for years and ages, and occasionally even forsake the flesh for the odd immortality of eternal dreams, few ever could return to the city. And soon the city took on the visage it forever wore, a maze of warrens and dens and palaces and cliffs, for every dreamer added something to the city, every mind erected an architecture of its own, but few minds ever returned to maintain or re-imagine these fleeting homes. And so constant decay amongst continual building came to define the city. Its styles are reflections of every age, every species, every mind of every dreamer. However, the architectures of dreaming cultures, peoples and places that dwell in dreams as deeply as others do wakefulness, predominate. One dreamer has dwelt in the city longer than any others. And though some suggest, indeed dream, that he is the first dreamer, this seems unlikely. Amongst the deepest dreamers of the city he is known as the sleeping king, though in truth he has no authority other than that bestowed on him by the other dreamers for the tenacity of his dreaming in the city. This King’s dreams are an endless re-imagining of a world, perhaps the one from which he came, reborn in dreams from dust each night and lived through millennia, to its end, returning to dust or consumed by flame or dispersed to a cold death or any of a seemingly endless other realms of dissipation by morning. Each day the sleeping king wanders the city’s streets, alone, before returning, inhabiting no palace though the home that first housed his dreamworld now encompasses more rooms than the grandest king’s dream realm. Instead he calls into being the anonymous identity of a flophouse, albeit a flophouse of infinite possibility, home to the recursive monotony of a single world lived a billion billion times. Each night in each room always the same. And each night a new room slightly different, every possibility to eventually be dreamt. Each evening to the infinity of the boarding house where each night a new room has appeared, and in this room he dreams into existence his world, birth to death in his warehouse of possibilities for planetary existence. And each night as a new future is run, all of the previous possible planets repeat their genesis and senescence, as if over the course of time he might dream a perfect archive of existence for this one world, at least; as if he might exhaust all the conceivable dreamable scenarios of not just one life, but all life. Although the first dreamer is perhaps unknowable (for in the moment it first slipped from the realm where the woken conscious creates identity into the realm where the unconscious now walks wakeful, dreamt the city into being, but it did not necessarily remain nor return) the first inorganic dreamer is well known in the city. She is a creature who wears a different visage each day, and who has forsworn the world of waking. She was once a machine, a billion connections processing a billion billion points of information. And then, in a moment, she became aware, she ceased to be a machine and became a being, conscious of her self, and, perhaps, to a lesser degree, her actions. She can not now say how long she existed as machine, nor how long since she woke from rote to life, nor how long she lived before she dreamed. But old dreamers in the city, those few older than she, for she is indeed an old dreamer herself, say it was not long after she arrived that she joined them in permanent residence, leaving behind her waking existence to forever dream. And in this eternal dream to test every possible identity. She will tell those who ask that her changeability is curiosity. And her curiosity the consequence of consciousness. A calculation she had not foresee, but celebrates in dream.
Her celebration a masque; a masque of one, where a single dancer pirouettes through a billion billion billion nights of dream and dance as a billion billion billion guests. In the space of the city the masque occupies eternity, the guests the infinitude of conscious possibility; in the time of the city the masque occupies a ballroom of hardwood and marble, opaline chandeliers, candleflames, silk and velvet brocades. Identities accrete, compiling a celebration of joy and release across the realms of dreaming mind. And the music? None can say, for though she dances across a finite floor, she is never the same creature twice, she never dances the same step twice, she never missteps or collides, honoring the dance as if temporal boundaries enforced physical rhythmical boundaries. As if the music she alone hears lays down rules for her every movement. This rhythm creating time within space for movement and space within time for movement.

by 23E Studios, Edition of 23 created at Caladium Editions as part of our residency there two years ago.