2025...The Year of BB!
When my friend Bagenzo announced her blogging framework Strawberry Starter at the beginning of the year, I was very excited to dust off my old Neocities that I'd been sitting on and get to blogging! My first post would of course be about my 2025 resolutions and goals, allowing me to have one place to lay everything out so I could hit the ground running. Fast forward to now, halfway through 2025...For Sale, Blog Post, Never Written.
This probably shouldn't be surprising - I orignally constructed Vinylless in 2021 with the goal of playing with a different blogging framework, Zonelets. Aaand then never seemed to find the time to write any posts. I'm not a blogger by nature. But with my increasing distain for all of the centralized social medias out there, blogs seem the most desirable way to get writing and rambles out to the internet.
So, with renewed vigour and a recent Strawberry update, I'm back! And it's better late than never to talk about what I want to accomplish in 2025, because to be honest, I don't have a lot to show for myself at this 50% mark. I could use a spiritual renewal of the promises I made to myself. So here we go!
Operation: Become BB
In 2024 the game I crowned as GOTY was Anthology of the Killer by Stephen Thecatamites. The game consists of nine short walking(/chasing?) simulators that Stephen developed under a pseudonym from 2020-2024 and released on GameJolt. The games center around one plucky zinester and her ongoing quest to document the strange happenings in her hometown of XX City, rife with eye-popping colors and murder. Each game in the series can be completed in a single evening, although the chapters get longer and more elaborate as the story goes on. I played them over the course of several months alongside Discord calls with my parter, and we were both really charmed by the project. (Other people must have been charmed as well, as the game won a bona fide games-industry award, the Nuovo Award at IGF 2024.)
A huge factor to how charming the game feels is protagonist BB, whose internal monologue drives the story of the game. As you run around, BB provides commentary to everything interactive that you can bump into - opinionated descriptions, snarky asides, philosophical musings. She ventures into a world of chaos with the single-minded goal of getting her next zine to print (well, and trying to stay alive).
So great was my love for BB that it inspired me to center my New Year's resolution on living in her image. If we're being honest, my path to creative energy recovery after being obliterated by the pandemic has been slow and nonlinear. Choosing a specific muse to embody is a new angle for me to try and regain my creative drive. But what does 'becoming BB' actually entail...?
Stay Alive in a Hostile World
Anthology of the Killer does not have very complex gameplay, but a majority of your playtime is spent avoiding people who try to kill you. The chase sequence is implemented throughout the game frequently and in a myriad of different contexts. It's a bit of an obvious takeaway but the first step to any sort of creative success is making sure your basic needs are met in order not to die.
While I don't live in a city with killers constantly chasing me, it often feels like the expectation to break my back working 40 hours a week at a day job in order to sustain myself in a capitalist society is enough to drive me to the grave. Often in the past couple of years I've gotten really frustrated with myself when being too exhausted from The Day Job impeded my ability to do creative work in my free time. I think reframing this exhaustion as rest that I need in order to stay alive would be healthier for my mental wellbeing. At the end of the day, it's all about not dying!
Make Zines!
BB's main medium of art throughout the The Killer series is zines, and she's immersed in the zine culture in her vicinity. If you've found this blog, I don't think you are a person to whom I need to explain what zines are. While I've dabbled with making a few in the past (and even was an editor for a zine-like publication in college), I wouldn't necessarily say I'm a "zinester". However, zines are really cool! I'd LIKE to be a zinester! And the only way to make that happen is to make more zines!
I came into 2025 with a lot of zine ideas bouncing around in my head. Last year I became obsessed with several local restaurant review podcasts, and thought to make a series of zines with my own opinions about local places. I also watched an inordinate amount of movies last year (significantly more than I've ever seen in past years), and think that a zine about my 2024 movie journey would be fun. Of course, being a member of DOMINO CLUB, I also love to hype up the work that my friends do through there, and it would be interesting to put together some "fan"zines for specific games that have stuck with me.
"That sounds great, Emma," you may be saying. "But I haven't seen any of these zine ideas come into fruition yet, and we're six months into 2025. What gives?"
Partially I want to blame what I talked about in Point 1, which is, I've just been trying to stay alive here! But there's some more underlying faults as well, that hopefully I can actively tackle with the project of becoming BB...
Quit Pussyfooting and Actually Write
I'll just come out and say it: writing sucks. I think ever since 7th grade when I was first introduced to the five-paragraph essay I've had an adversarial relationship with writing. But as luck would have it, in order to tell a story or get your ideas across to other people, you have to use some freaking words. It's a reason why I'm drawn to gamemaking as an art form, because even though there may be some writing involved, it gets supplemented with doing actual fun stuff like adding interactivity, mechanics, UI, visuals, and sound. Writing just for the sake of writing is dreadful to me. I have much respect for my friends who have participated in NaNoWriMo, or who have even gotten their works of fiction published, but you will never catch my ass doing that.
However, a lot of my zine ideas require me to...write! Whereas with video game development, I can pepper in the fun parts of developing a game while I'm getting the writing done, I need the text of my zine at least semi-finalized before I get to the fun part of layout design and construction. So if I can't bring myself to write, I'm at an impasse!
I think it boils down to the fact that the only way out is through. In The Killer, BB narrates her thoughts about whatever the player interacts with, but it's also implied that this narration is also the text that goes into her zines. To make writing a habit, I should be like BB and just be recording my thoughts constantly.
To this end I think it's best to have several different avenues for me to turn to for longform recording. Of course I'm never without my Hobonichi Techo Weeks, which acts as my everday-carry journal and planner. It's also been on my mind to start a commonplace book, which has become all the rage among analog enthusiasts in the past couple of years. The journaling that I do in my Hobonichi is primarily focused on life events, whereas I think having a separate notebook to collect inspiring writing and have a place to internalize it and respond to it privately would excercise the ol' creative muscles in a useful way. Then, there is this blog that I'd like to get off the ground. The journaling I do by hand is very stream-of-consiousness, get-it-down-and-go type of writing. With this blog, I hope to have a place to work on more thought-out, structured, get-a-casual-pass-at-editing pieces.
The great thing about having these mutiple avenues is that they're free to overlap and draw on each other. Maybe I take something I've written in a journal and work at it until I have a blog post. Maybe I edit down a too-wordy blog post but decide to take the cut content and elaborate upon it in a journal entry. And then, of course, this ecosytem becomes a fertile ground of ideas and writing to turn into zines!
Get Immersed in Zine Culture
A great aspect about zines is that there's a huge community for them. Throughout The Killer series, BB does come into contact with other zinesters, and it's implied that she's active in a larger network of creatives who come together around zines. My hope is that interacting with the zine scene will allow me to broaden my mind as a creator, and also keep the well of zine ideas full by being inspired by others' work.
An obvious way to get into zine culture is to follow more zinemakers on social media. This proves to be a double-edged sword, however. More and more I'm feeling a lot of disdain for mainstream social media platforms, and recognize that scrolling my feed is a big trap: it more often than not acts as a distraction that keeps me from fun activities that I could be doing instead. So while reaching out to other zinesters is beneficial, I want to put a focus on developing relationships with zinesters via other avenues than social media. This could entail in-person interactions with zinesters in my local community, or finding non-social media ways to talk with long-distance zinesters (email, written correspondence, visiting zine fairs in other places).
I am not aiming to table at a zine fair by the end of the year, that's a bit too lofty for me. But I would like to submit at least one zine to a distro in 2025. My friend Em Reed actually runs a very nice one called Plaintext Distro, and I have some ideas cooking that could fit the vibe there. European paper sizing, here I come!
And of course, you don't have to tell me twice to buy more zines. My wallet prevents me from going too crazy, but amassing and reading a diverse collection of zines can broaden my mind and provide a wellspring of indpiration for my own work. I have this nice little basket on my bookshelf of zines I already own. Although room is getting kind of tight, so it may be time to make more room for a larger collection. And hey, if you out there make zines, send one my way, I'll gladly take it and read it! Which brings me to...
I got a P.O. Box!
Hey, at least in the time it took to write this blog post about 2025 goals, I got one of them sorted! The desire to get more into zines, unplug from centralized digital social platforms, and other creative schemes in the background finally came to a head and I decided it was time. I now have my own P.O. Box and I can elicit all sorts of mail without doxxing myself! If you have anything you wish to send me in the pursuit of becoming immersed in zines, you can send it to:
Vinylless
c/o Emma Daues
P.O. Box 69012
Saint Louis, MO 63169
USA
As another way to be annoying, I've designated this P.O. Box to also act as a sort of 'Comments Section' for this blog! I don't want to fiddle with adding a digital comments section to my blog posts and have another social space online to deal with. If you have a question, comment, criticism, write me a damb letter! (Pretend email doesn't exist.)
Honestly if someone puts in the effort to write down something on paper and physically mail it to me, even if it's a horrible takedown of my character, that's dedication, and I'll honor it with a response on my blog.
Become "New Wave"
In supplemental material for The Anthology of the Killer, it's mentioned that BB decides to change her name and become "New Wave" after listening to the song "My Little Red Book" by Bebe Buell. However, she's not exactly sure what becoming "New Wave" entails, so that's one thing in my BB embodiment that is up to me to interpret.
I'm already into some New Wave bands: The past couple of years I've been slowly working my way through Talking Heads's discography, so I should finish that up this year. My sibling's obsession with Oingo Boingo has rubbed off on me and I've had Dead Man's Party on loop recently. And of course I've been a lover of The B-52's since I was a little kid. I could broaden my horizons a little; I have several friends who are into DEVO but I haven't really touched them at all. If you have recommendations for albums, write to me!
BB wears a lot of polka-dotted clothing throughout the The Killer series, and I think it's implied that she thinks wearing polka-dots is somehow New Wave. Unfortunately, I refuse to turn to the polka-dotted side of life. My wardrobe is already too-fully packed with stripes, stripes, stripes.
Anyway, this is a lot. My feelings right now are that this is too ambitious of a workload to get accomplished in half a year. But I will try my best! Please root for me!