I enjoyed this but found the "intended reading experience" irritating. I would have preferred to just read the italic text and wonder what that was all about until the reveal at the end.
My partner pointed out that some of the action sequences felt very anime-esque, because the characters called out all of their moves beforehand. I had done this under the cover of "they're calling out spells for the purposes of communication" but now I think it would be served well as an anime :)
Oh wow this is amazing! This is pretty much how I originally envisioned this - thanks so much for making this! How long did it take/was it a lot of work?
It's not too much, just making a trigger to switch which text block is visible when you scroll to the bottom (I had to figure out how to make js scroll triggers work, fortunately my cousin's good at that stuff and helped me out with it).
Cool! I super appreciate it, and please thank your cousin as well for me :) I have zero technical know-how so this is basically voodoo magic to me.
I'm giving anti-memes a rest for a while, but changing text in the setting of altered memories is something I want to explore in the future. There's a certain effect I want to go for where the reader feels gaslighted (the characters keep referencing events that contradict what you read, but then when you scroll up to reference, it's there exactly as mentioned) but which would be considerably more complex to write. Maybe several months from now I'll revisit the idea!
Re the formating, I don't know if it's possible on substack, but there is a really neat trick in this story that is like what you mention https://qntm.org/hypothesis
Thank you for this link! I remember reading this story a while back, and either missed the blanking effect or forgot (redacted?) about it entirely. I'm a big fan of qntm in general (and obviously this story owes a debt to them).
Substack seems like it's relatively restrictive in terms of what they allow you to do, but alas one day! Shaked (see comments above) made a separate site with the effect.
qntm's javascript is clean and right in the source for that page. I don't know if substack allows javascript like that, but if they do, then anyone decent at javascript (me?) should be able to adapt it from that page to this one, and reverse/tweak the effect.
I enjoyed this but found the "intended reading experience" irritating. I would have preferred to just read the italic text and wonder what that was all about until the reveal at the end.
Point well taken :) At some point I might revisit the concept, so what people find readable vs. not is useful info.
Alternatively, you might have used colored text, which would at least have been easier to hunt for upon going back to scan the text.
Someone needs to animate this!
My partner pointed out that some of the action sequences felt very anime-esque, because the characters called out all of their moves beforehand. I had done this under the cover of "they're calling out spells for the purposes of communication" but now I think it would be served well as an anime :)
Alright, this is great but it bothered me that you didn't do the changing text thing, so I went ahead and uploaded a version that has that here
https://storybook-4jm.pages.dev/
(Hopefully it's okay, I credit/ link to the source but if it bothers you that I copied it lmk and I'll take it down)
Oh wow this is amazing! This is pretty much how I originally envisioned this - thanks so much for making this! How long did it take/was it a lot of work?
I'll link to the site at the top of the story :)
It's not too much, just making a trigger to switch which text block is visible when you scroll to the bottom (I had to figure out how to make js scroll triggers work, fortunately my cousin's good at that stuff and helped me out with it).
Cool! I super appreciate it, and please thank your cousin as well for me :) I have zero technical know-how so this is basically voodoo magic to me.
I'm giving anti-memes a rest for a while, but changing text in the setting of altered memories is something I want to explore in the future. There's a certain effect I want to go for where the reader feels gaslighted (the characters keep referencing events that contradict what you read, but then when you scroll up to reference, it's there exactly as mentioned) but which would be considerably more complex to write. Maybe several months from now I'll revisit the idea!
Excellent as usual, thanks for posting!
Re the formating, I don't know if it's possible on substack, but there is a really neat trick in this story that is like what you mention https://qntm.org/hypothesis
Thank you for this link! I remember reading this story a while back, and either missed the blanking effect or forgot (redacted?) about it entirely. I'm a big fan of qntm in general (and obviously this story owes a debt to them).
Substack seems like it's relatively restrictive in terms of what they allow you to do, but alas one day! Shaked (see comments above) made a separate site with the effect.
Thanks as always for reading :)
qntm's javascript is clean and right in the source for that page. I don't know if substack allows javascript like that, but if they do, then anyone decent at javascript (me?) should be able to adapt it from that page to this one, and reverse/tweak the effect.