Farewell Online Privacy

the bridge troll when i refuse to answer his riddle:

ARG notes: ZampanioSim

Okay, a work this metafictional and also that (I think) responds to audience interaction is going to need a high-caliber gimmick. Hang on.

...

Alright. Hey guys, catfishAnabasis (Light) here, taking a moment out of my surprisingly busy day tell you about a weird thing on the internet.

ZampanioSim is an intricate and brainbending ARG. It takes direct inspiration from Homestuck, The Magnus Archives, and House of Leaves, as well as the creator (JR, jadedResearcher/justifiedRecursion)'s previous canon of Homestuck fan-work and games. A major theme is "unreality".

HERE IS YOUR TRAILHEAD.

Feel free to ignore the rest of the writeup and check it out now.

I know very little about JR's other work, right now. However, among my many INTERESTS, I am something of a TMA ENJOYER and an AMATEUR INTERNET INVESTIGATOR, and if I were in a HOUSE I like to think I could LEAVE it pretty easily.

So, yeah. I figured I'd just describe my experience of this rabbithole and maybe you'll want to check it out too. I'm sure this will only scratch the surface.

ZampanioSim is structured as a nested labyrinth. In the same way that:

Homestuck is a webcomic framed as an interactive adventure game about an account of kids playing a video game (Sgrub) that doesn't exist, and

House of Leaves is a novel framed as a found scholarly discussion about a documentary (The Navidson Record) that doesn't exist about a house that doesn't exist,

ZampanioSim is a game-based ARG framed as an attempt to simulate a game (Zampanio) that doesn't exist based on a found FAQ of the game (that only sort of exists).

More concretely, ZampanioSim features a lot of nested browser games, as well as audio, narrative, an actual audience-interactive narrative game (the way Homestuck was originally), external websites, and more.

The starting point is, of course, the House:

ZampanioSim takes full advantage of the browser as medium. There is content accessible via the address bar, developer tools, cookies (I think), the developer console, and probably more that I haven't realized.

Like, to give you a sense of the kind of rabbithole we're dealing with: Here's a map I made of the House outset page today:

...And I say today because the House does change over time. Today (a friday) when I clicked on the EastEast route, for instance, I was greeted by this grotesquely distorted version of Rebecca Black's "Friday":

Okay, let's talk about what we have going on in the House map, starting from the doors and working out. (I've given some of these my own names for clarity.)

North

The Classpect Menu Game:

This, I think, is the main titular "ZampanioSim". It's the part that's intended to recreate the experience of a supposed old computer game, but by and large, you only experience the menu screen, not the rest of the gameplay. You can select attributes (based on Homestuck's Classpecting system + the Magnus Archives fears) gain points and select skills and (depending on your seed) eventually "beat the game". It's glitchy, it's a hellscape, there's an entity or two in the menu system that are trying to talk to you. It's great fun. Contains links to a rabbithole (which you can plug passwords into for more secrets) and + some secrets to you in the credits.

(While mostly the aspects seem to add flavor to the menu options, there's a special class called "Waste". This appears in neither TMA nor Homestuck, but comes from a fan or meta-joke that Andrew Hussie and Toby Fox, the writer and a major composer for Homestuck, are classpected* as the "Waste of Space" and "Waste of Time". By telling it you're a "Waste"you're more likely to get weird glitches and new options in your Classpect Menu game run - there's a fun recurring element in some of these games about the game changing depending on who you tell it is playing. I learned about the Waste trick from JR's youtube channel. Also, setting your birthday as Halloween might also do something.)

I have no idea if the different iterations of games here are substantially different. I haven't checked. There's a lot going on. "There's a lot going on" is a good summary of ZampanioSim overall.

*( Uh, classpecting is this in-Homestuck personality system where game players are a [Role] of [Element].)

Eyedlr: Eyedol Games is the company that supposedly made the original game Zampanio. Eyedlr is their spambot-filled tumblr clone, which also has secrets in it. (Actually, just assume everything has secrets out.)

East

The House Exploration game: It has the same setup screen as the Classpect Menu game, but this one drops you into a game with visuals: An infinite(?) procedural house you navigate with imagery derived from your choices.

Peewee's exploration game: When it's not blasting Rebecca Black's Friday But Weird into your ears, the EastEast route is another procedural infinite(?) maze, except that you type directions to Peewee, a snake guy with goggles who also moves around on his own. This one also introduces named characters we learn more about elsewhere.

Bathroom text: Procredural bathroom maze, unless it's just some text telling you to take a break. ZampanioSim really likes telling you to take breaks and hydrate, so that you can better appreciate and spread Zampanio.

Absolutely not. Also, I'm a busy woman. I have to finish this writing summary first.

South

The Train Game: a game - notably not a maze - where JR walks down a series of train corridors and monologues to you about the game and the "reality" behind it.

The mazecrawler game: You tell a little guy how to navigate an infinite(?) maze - and if you choose right and open up your browser's Console menu, you can learn a great deal more about

West

The only West route is AdventureSimWest, which is an actual text narrative game where readers submit commands that the author incorporates into updates - just like early Homestuck. It's still going. The logs are extensive but it's mostly about the antics of a new employee at Eyedol Games, which is stuck in a time loop.

Other

Then there's some other scattered clickable text -

The truth about alt: An exchange between two shapeshifters.

A transcript: A dialogue between two people who apparently work for Eyedol Games.

The lower left leads you to an apparently rotating selection of other Zampanio-related games. I particularly liked NagaGirlfriend.

None of this is even the stuff you can reach this page exclusively through the Console menu.

And much more

And there's a lot of stuff that's NOT branching directly off of the house. There's other things you find buried in links or by searching - a discord and a wiki that both straddle the line between in-character and -out, Archive of Our Own content, a youtube channel, the Eyedol website...

Is there a "story" to ZampanioSim?

Yes.

Like I said, there's a lot I haven't seen yet. But what's going on is something like this:

JR is attempting to recreate this game, Zampanio, of course, and tap into its fanbase. The game Zampanio is an infectious meme. Eyedol Games is a transdimensional company that is perhaps both trying to spread the meme and contain it, by removing its spores, e.g. the Zampanio FAQ - the thing that inspired JR to make ZampanioSim - from the internet.

Various parts of the game recognize that they are fictional and may identify you the reader/player as "Observers".

There are a few recurring characters who have gotten swept up into the meme, either working for Eyedol or trapped in ZampanioSim or both, and have followed it from variant to transdimensional variant.

(this is an image from homestuck. it's a reference.)

Japes aside, this is a brain-bending, very cool, and completely ludicrous unfiction project which I believe is made mostly by one person with an unparalleled hand for web sorcery, whimsy, and vibes. The vibes are so good.

The host website, Farrago Fiction (which AFAICT is a multi-person project), hosts a number of often-homestuck-inspired weird games and simulators.

I know ZampanioSim is now a few years old and is still actively updating. Consider checking it out.

2024-08-24 edit: Part 2!

HELLO EVERYONE!!!

Welcome to my introduction and master post for the entirety of November!

For those not in the know, November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)! The official goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month! A truly ambitious endeavor, to be sure *nods*. Now, I've only ever come close to that goal once, maybe twice, as far as I can remember (and I've been doing this since I was thirteen, so that's a good few years), so instead of being a good girl and following the rules, I'm gonna rebel and make my own goal for this month. Which brings me to the purpose of this post!

I am going to dedicate each day of November to writing on a given prompt!

It can be a single word prompt, it can be a full scene prompt! It can be a themed prompt, or it can be a generic one! The point is, every day will have a mini fic based on a prompt, with one prompt per day. They won't all necessarily go together, in fact, they'll probably mostly be part of entirely different fandoms! Either way, I'll link them all back here as a master list with a list of what fandoms each prompt is part of. I'm not entirely sure how I'll organize it all, yet, but I promise I'll try to make sure it all makes sense 😅

If anyone wants to give me a prompt, please, feel free to drop me an ask or a comment!

If I like a prompt enough, I'll tag you in the ficlet when it's posted! I'll try to remember to include where I get each prompt somewhere in the post, but if I forget, go ahead and ask if you're curious 😅

Without any further ado~

Master List:

Day One (Danny Phantom × DC crossover)

Day Two (Danny Phantom × DC crossover, Fake Cryptid Real Ghost au)

Day Three (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, halfa!Jason adopts runaway!Danny)

Day Four (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, coffee creamer AU)

Day Five (Star Wars, Mandalorian!Obi-Wan au with a twist)

Day Six (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, bio!dad Bruce and semi-feral!Danny)

Day Seven (Miraculous Ladybug × DC crossover, red string of fate au)

Day Eight (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, ghostly Wayne adoption au)

Day Nine (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, magic mirror zoom call au (au name subject to change))

Day Ten (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, pit possessed Jason au)

Day Eleven (Danny Phantom × DC crossover, adoptive father!Jason au with Billy Batson and Danny Fenton being the adoptees)

Day Twelve (Harry Potter, Fred and George adopt Harry)

Not A Ficlet, Sorry

Day Fourteen (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Ten)

Day Fifteen (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, mistaken identity au)

Day Sixteen (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Two)

Day Seventeen (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Three)

Day Eighteen (Danny Phantom × Batman, Danny adopts halfa!Jason)

Day Nineteen (Danny Phantom × Batman, continuation of Day Eight)

Day Twenty (Danny Phantom × Batman, continuation of Day Eighteen)

Day Twenty-One (Avatar: The Last Airbender, origin of the boomerang)

Day Twenty-Two (Danny Phantom × Batman, synthetic ectoplasm au)

Again, Not A Ficlet, Sorry

Day Twenty-Four (Danny Phantom × Batman, Dani gets low-key adopted)

And Yet Again, Not A Ficlet, Sorry

Birthday Hiatus

Day Twenty-Seven (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, Bio!Dad Bruce and Cop Danny)

Day Twenty-Eight (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Seventeen)

Day Twenty-Nine (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Four)

Day Thirty (Danny Phantom × Batman crossover, continuation of Day Sixteen)

when you try to get into the png nightclub but you see the dotted rectangle surrounding the bouncer stretch him wider to block the entrance cus ur not on his clipboard

jazz-induced psychosis

Same man I was before

These are so fun to make

god told me to build a boat