Z

23/04/2026

 

Honestly, I feel exhausted.

Past September, the project got bloated around Part B, with almost 60% of it being written and edited in the span of 3-4 months. Then again, I feel like this bloating of content started long before. It feels as if, there have been many chances for the project to be much lighter, but all of those got lost around the time I strained to put out more into the meat of the story. Not necessarily bad, but I feel that the project picks up at Part B with some initial tripping around its own legs. That rush, dense text seems (to me) to have a better rythm past the halfway of the book.

If kenophobic, hyperdetailed is a theme of the Immaterial Contest, I suppose that it is consistly there. Bombastic, loud, I like to believe some of the images inside this project are unique, following underground aesthetics in industrial techno, oldschool violent games, myths and some new reiteration of past cultures. A lot of this kenophobic aesthetic was drawn from a game I was once deeply invested in called Dominions 6, but more or less I've just used it as a proxy to insert and compile a lot of relevant mythology and culture into the project. Constantly developing these aesthetics and drawing different influence is never tiring. Writing it all down is, if anything, refreshing, exciting. All the little things that take our time just come together to make this project.

The only thing that makes me exhausted is just that this work never ends. Honestly, the project was finished around... February? Then came editing and working with a few people to make some artwork. Or just, other projects in the meantime, or just life in general drawing my attention elsewhere. I even lost my job few months ago, but that hardly matters when there is some better way to rewrite a paragraph. There is always more to do.

Anyways. I am glad that some themes got developed in this project. There is something in this book that I want to read. I can only talk about myself on this regard, since the project was mostly written with few inputs from others. Once again, a solitary project, which I don't really like, but I guess sometimes, some things must be completed in relative isolation, no matter how stupid and sad this is to me.

And, well, it is sad. I am wholly to blame here for stupidly doing things alone again.

How does one even draw interest and feedback into a niche project that is some weird mix between 2000s arena shooters, weird, sci-fi magical realism and just plain, normal moments? Have I even hit a fine point between these themes? Do the characters make sense in a world that moves between these... things? It is very likely that other people would have invited great feedback into the Immaterial Contest, but it just never occured to me until it was all way past a manageable volume of text. I didn't want to bog someone down with 60k words.

As for the end result? I have absolutely no clue. There are stacked thoughts and arguments somewhere in all the thoughts I've made in 2025 and yet they are all meaningless. Arguments that stop making sense after a while and it all tells me that I've done a good job already.

Every point, every narrative and name and every hard-to-mix cultural reference is just something out there in the real, made into language. There is horror built into this story, pain, even its muted expression or just the grandiose efforts for things greater than the characters themselves, or a framework that refuses to define itself in some unnatural clarity. All I wanted was to ground the story with the simplest things that can happen in life. Is that simple, is that complex? Seems to me that the more I try to point at it with my finger I always fall into a conflicting miss. It is just how it is. There is solid groundwork laid for all concepts, developed in another project, but one day we will get to that.

I have no motive to convince or change the worldview or challenge the beliefs of anyone that reads this story. I don't feel a coward for this either. And neither do I want to paint myself, endlessly proud and brave, gloating that I have made something great. Things are whatever they are and it is better that any and all labels put into this project are done by you, the reader.

The Immaterial Contest is a story about spectacle and death. Tragedies pass as everyday things that have no value and sometimes the characters poke through the mist to grasp at how horrible it all is. Value, emotions, beliefs are misaligned things in a world where anything brutal can become a spectacle and where people believe all little esoteric signs around them to speak for what is about to happen. And even so, there is love in many textures, false delusions trampled, weird people going about weird times and at the end of it all, simple fun, all nothing too dissimilar to what one can find out there today.

 

Last year, in someone's blog I remember reading a metaphor about the Internet, as a vast electric sea that we all sail through nowadays. Maybe it is that this year's work of ~150000 words is just a little ripple in this vast body of water. Thinking it so feels good. Feels right that out here in our own little webpages we can still put such nice images into the heads of strangers.

In any case, whoever is reading this, I hope you give it a go. I hope that my work becomes something that you can look back at and say that it was a worthwhile read.

 

At the end of the day, completing something is just another massive weight dropping from a pair of shoulders. I think I'll be in Rome in the following week. There's most likely spelling errors I've missed somewhere in there (or here), but oh well. I'll not go that far, I'll always be somewhere around the Mediterranean correcting my mistakes.

Have a good one stranger!