my dealer: got some straight gas🔥😛 this strain is called house of leaves😳 you'll be zonked out of your gourd💯

me: yeah whatever. i don't feel shit

5 min later: dude i swear the house is 1/4" bigger on the inside

my buddy, will navidson, pacing: our house is God

concept art for a Johnny Truant (house of leaves) fortnite skin

This is not for you.

𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞.

house of eazy

A house is a black square that echos

what's house of leaves?

the short version is, it's a book about a book about a book about a book about a movie that never existed about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. it is probably the single most famous/notorious existing work of "ergodic fiction", meaning basically fiction which exists in such a complex relationship with its medium that it takes nontrivial effort just to consume, meaning uhhhh a lot of it looks like this,

or worse!

it's like, fifty percent an extremely high-effort mockery of modern academia, it's often doing its active best to be completely incomprehensible to you, its and i cannot emphasize this enough A Space With A Beast In It. its awfully dear to my heart also. or as mark z danielewsky who wrote it puts it:

"I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right.

having a real good time reading house of leaves for the first time

(yes I know the Room is super obscure compared to the others. Idc, he's my favorite blorbo.)

S/O to @very-tired-child!! His posting about Places That Are Characters (and his excellent humanizations) are what inspired my own spin on the idea.

"Annotated" versions under the cut.

ive had the image of this meme in my head for so long

hi johnny truant hiiiiiiii

sketch + explanations under break

^ sketch/lineart since you cant really see it in the actual drawing lol.

afaik, theres no real concrete description of what he looks like (aside from very vague stuff + his arm scars), so i just made some shit up based off his lifestyle lmfao.

i reallyyyyy wanted to make the golden ratio blue to match the house, but it just didnt look good no matter how i twisted it around - dark blue just didnt pop.

im happy with this in the end, though - i think i made the vision work.

i love johnny too, his footnotes were a breath of fresh air after the Horror bits of the navidson record. though i am taking him at a bit face value, i.e. assuming johnny is like a real person and kind of just ignoring some more creative theories on his identity.

will navidson should have just parried the fuck out of the Minotaur

If I had a nickel for every middle aged man doomed by a narrative of his own construction and haunted by an entity he cannot control or easily defeat I'd have twoooooo nickels

god. uh. myhouse.wad, huh? I have, frankly, way too many thoughts about this entire mod. Please bear with me as I try to ramble my way through them, I ended up going off under the read more.

I’m going to be honest, this game felt like an extended, emotional fetch quest for me until this point. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that all the items had emotional and memorial impact, but...this one got to me. This moment hit me like a fucking truck.

For those of you who don’t play Dungeon and Dragons, sessions get long. On average they can run anywhere between 4-6 hours, but I myself have played longer, with the longest taking the cake at almost a half day, or roughly 11 hours. A lot can happen in a session, and most of it is just...joking around. The phrase “roll for intercourse” is a reference to an age-old running gag of players trying to seduce an NPC for whatever reason. It’s funny. It happens so often it’s a meme.

But finding it here...it really hit me. This isn’t just a reference to a well-known meme. Tom and Steve sat down and played D&D together, spending multiple hours in a day to play sessions, likely with other players but always with each other. And this phrase? It stuck out, it’s a moment that stuck with Steve for one reason or another, and my only guess is to say it’s because it‘d become an inside joke. And...you can’t help but wonder what it was. If Steve had been DMing, or if he’d been the one trying to seduce the NPC much to Tom’s chagrin, or...what.

And that at the core is the devastating part of myhouse.wad. The more I sit and think about it, the more I think about it, the more I realize this map is chock full of inside jokes, and we as players will never understand them. Because it’s not meant for us. These are things we’ll never have context for because one of the people involved is gone now. And the more I think about it, the more the realization hit that this entire map is not a game and really, truly is a memorial.

Do you remember when we played with Legos together? Do you remember when we played video games? Drinking milkshakes in the basement, sharing a pop? Our inside jokes? Roll for intercourse. Pumpkin Rick. Shrek chasing after you. Do you remember when we got married? I do. The house does. The house loves you. I love you. I miss you.

This map reads like a conversation, someone reaching out to someone else. You can’t help but wonder who is reaching out to who, though.

You know, I was talking to some friends on Discord about this map, and one of them brought up something interesting that I agree with. myhouse.wad draws clear inspiration from House of Leaves, but there’s a distinct difference between them. They both have heavy themes of grief and closure, but where House of Leaves is mysterious because of the layers and layers of unreliable narrators, myhouse.wad is mysterious because of you’re only ever hearing one side of the conversation. House of Leaves makes me feel like I’m intruding on something that no human should ever know. myhouse.wad makes me feel like I’m hearing part of a conversation through a wall.

Either way, there is one thing that both works share: This is not for you. It never was.

You know, I kind of wonder what their D&D campaign was about, if this moment was enough to stick out as an inside joke. I wonder what their sessions were like. I hope they had fun.