the Budafoki amended

The χ0 Collective member known only as wanderl00 vanished from our lives sometime in early 2020, just as COVID was sweeping country after country and forcing us all into lockdown. He —W presented as a he, but the Collective are a furtive bunch who like a bit of cloak and dagger— had an active interest in such staple fields as media archaeology, occult cybernetics, and all kinds of confabulation phenomena. He was an especially keen researcher of video game "failware," those projects that were so fraught and cursed they could never even materialize, or worse yet, could and did.

The disintegration of the personal realm effected by the plague times stymied some of our members and their output, while supercharging others to the point of glossolalia. W's absence however was insidious. The long thread of nothing where there should be something grew alarming. Members are chary of going into each other's meatspace existence, but perhaps in the din even the loosest groups start to worry about the seam.

The only point of contact was W's relatively normal blog The Budafoki Amended. In it he wrote commentary on pop culture, bits of fiction he sometimes got published, and personal essays, sometimes all at the same time. We can't really know if any of the sparse comments that appear on TBA originate with our members. Most would be content to see the site occasionally plop something new, and so it did up until late 2021. At which point it started to do weird things. 

Whether W intended this as a literary conceit or simply lost some of his marbles, whether TBA is now a meditation on time or an inventory of personal defeat, whether even it's meant to be read by anyone or just him, is anyone's guess. What's interesting is that after a few clever clicks, it begins to produce dialogue options. It becomes, in other words, a video game.

One way or another, the Collective is happy to submit its first public offering in the form of this eerily undead site. Within its pages are reflections and ghostly echoes, linked by memory and the slow disaster of a selfhood in danger. Beckoned, we can only pull at the seam, looking into the next layer, looking for the next clue...

—χ0 Collective, September 2024

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