[no maps below the surface]
Does it chronicle the birth of a nation? Is it a tale of romance, obvious or not? Is it art? Or is it the ramblings of a wannabe artist?
What is known about atashi.org
is all that you want to know, if you search deep enough. Enigmatic in its layout, and sometimes even more puzzling in its contents, atashi.org is the result of a newborn growing, and discovering itself.
Filled with poems, short stories, sometimes puzzling imagery, and lots of things to click, atashi.org hosts a body of work waiting to be explored.
atashi.org provides examples of:
- All Just a Dream - Trance Two: how energy stays alive
- Ambiguous Gender: The narrator of “how energy stays alive” constantly switches between using “he” and “she” for the second character.
- Arc Number: 17, referenced in the epigraph and other places.
- Bittersweet Ending - Tranche One: Lost Correspondence: fragment zero.
- Dying Dream - A possible interpretation for Tranche Three: desiderata.
- Fictional Document -
- ’’Lost Correspondence’’ has some of the makings of a Scrapbook Story.
- ’’Legal Fiction’’ is the homepage for the presumably fictional atashi foundation.
- ’’With Portfolio’’ lists fake addresses for the design agency summer moon
- Gratuitous Foreign Language - There are a variety of excerpts that are inexplicably in Japanese, Chinese, on one occasion Korean, and even an entire entry in Latin.
- Kill It with Fire - Tranche Two: a momentary displacement.
- Magical Realism - ‘’Fragment Zero’’
- Mind Screw - The entire site layout is rather disjointed and labyrinthical.
- Mood Whiplash - The Tranche Two: seasonal affective disorder starts off rather grim, and becomes something else at the very end.
- Privately Owned Society - Perhaps implied by Tranche Two: west 74 / 66 east.
- Retraux -
- “terminal five” is an apparent screenshot of a terminal emulation program.
- “microfiche reader” is noised to look like a bad photographic slide.
- “now as then” by default gives Traditional Chinese characters with complex numerals.
- Ridiculous Future Inflation - Demonstrated in Tranche Two: west 74 / 66 east.
- Shout-Out - There’s the expected Japanese culture items, as well a number of references to Western music.
- Undying Loyalty - 0.haodao SYSTEM offers to forever promote the atashi foundation, regardless the cause.
- Unreliable Narrator - Referenced in the FAQ in “the thread pool”.
- Wistful Amnesia - The protagonist of Tranche Three: desiderata remembers only a feeling a familiarity for what he calls The Exchange.
