reedsreedsreeds

Romeo and/or Juliet, my choose-your-own-path version of Romeo and Juliet with over a hundred endings illustrated by the best artists working today, comes out June 7th!  It’s got FOUR playable characters, secret endings, secret books-within-a-book, a comic book section, AND MORE - and we’re spending the month until release playing the book, starting at the first page, seeing what happens, and letting YOU decide what happens next!  You can also pre-order the book right now and hopefully you… ALREADY HAVE?? 

Yesterday our choice as Juliet to check out the BOY ZONE or go back home, and unsurprisingly boys beat boredom, so let’s do that!

ENTER THE ROMEO DISTRICT

You make your way down to the Romeo District. Your parents aren’t going to marry you off, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a dude on your own terms, right? Nothing serious though. You’re 16; there’ll be plenty of time to get serious when you’re way older and way less nubile! 

You find yourself a promising-looking place called All Too Precious Brew and sit yourself down at the bar. In front of you is a tiny little book with “BEER MENU, FEATURING THE WINTER’S ALE” printed on the front. Hey, Juliet! It’s like one of those An Adventure Might Happen Depending on Your Choices books, except instead of choosing to go on an imaginary adventure that didn’t actually happen, you get to choose a beer in real life and then you get to drink that beer! That’s way better!

You open up the book and peruse your choices. There are a few that look interesting: 

Stout and Bitter 

Pale and Singl-Ale

ImTEARial Stout

Barley Whine 

Hey, all the drinks here are sexual-frustration themed! You figure there must be a lot of horny dudes down here in the Romeo District. Either that or the brewers need to get out more. Maybe both?

Probably both?

Anyway, you choose which beer you want, AND THEN, you choose to order it. Your adventure in beer is well under way!

A few seconds later, the bartender delivers your beer. You hold it above your head in a toast. “I drink to the general joy of the whole bar,” you say, and then you take a swig.

As you lower your beer from your lips you notice that the two seats next to you now have men in them. Hah! Classic Romeo District!

OPTION HOW YOU DOIN’: Examine dudes

OPTION NOTHING IS WORSE THAN TALKING TO STRANGERS: Ignore dudes

***

Ein bisschen Spaß muss sein…

Sometimes everybody needs to kid around a bit…

Mira este ignorante

Looking For A Connection In An Infinite Jukebox

“Music [ownership] being a very individual experience hasn’t stopped with online streaming, even though the physical form is gone,” Nylund Hagen says of her research. “Even though people don’t own the music literally, they get the feeling of ownership through the effort put into the streaming services; there’s the effort in making playlist, their originality and how they find their own music.” Whereas in the past what you had in your music library was indicative of your personal tastes, with streaming services the personal touch of a music listener comes down to organization.

I started my comic, Dinosaur Comics, on February 1st, 2003. Joey Comeau and Emily Horne started A Softer World six days later, and not too long afterwards Joey emailed me. "What are you going to do with your Nobel Prize for Comics money?“ he asked. "My name’s Joey. I do a comic too.”

There’s a few points at which this conversation doesn’t line up properly with the actual story as it’s revealed later; I think I just threw this dialogue together with no plan but a general attempt to move things forward and increase tension and mystery. I’d figured out a lot more between this point and Chapter 2.

Blood, seed and milk.