itch.io

(A long-overdue review from a fan and former cohost user, who has followed the poem since books IX and X)

There is *nothing* like Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.  It changed how I see poetry. It gave me an out to read when I was having a really bad depressive episode. It is one of my favorite things, it's an autismic special interest that I'm always eagerly working into conversations. I have read most of the poem several times over. There are parts of it I can quote from memory.

We used to think we didn't like "high style", it felt like a walled garden we were not allowed into. We never saw ourselves, or the things that excite us, depicted in it.  But this poem has toxic yuri! It has insects! It has noticing the speed of sound! It has ring-ships and radios AI's and aquariums and dragons and hyperspace and even (I fear to say it but I must) cool world-building! :D And it would not have captured our attention nearly as much if all of this were not written in the flowery, uncringing voice of a homeric epic. High Style is SO BACK and you can write anything you can dream of in it.

The poetry is *good*! It uses forms almost like leitmotifs in a movie, which is *really* effective, especially for the death-poems. It introduced me to many wonderful obscure words. It makes me want to go write my own fantastical poetry. I'm really glad it's written in strictly-followed 5-beat lines (and alliterative verse!) rather than free verse. There is a wonderful feeling to getting immersed in a long narrative poem; after a while, you entrain to the ever-present rhythm and it becomes a magical, even hypnotic experience. Books IX and X sent us *nonverbal*. In a very very good way.

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright also secretly is an accessible bridge to pre-modern poetry. It uses many common poetic forms, and regularly references and shares themes/motifs with older texts,  which makes going and reading something like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Iliad even more exciting, because you'll see little glimmers of this poem in them. This poem got me to take an interest in a bunch of *other* poetry we would have NEVER even known about, let alone read, otherwise. We are over here trying to learn to read Middle English with all its yoȝs and þorns because of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.

It's also kinda refreshing to see good fiction that expects you to have a brain and basic critical reading skills and to understand that this story is (in-world) *propaganda.* It's a good ol' fashioned I-Can-Fix-Her-Says-Girl-Who-Is-Worse type story and it's one of my go-to comfort readings when I need something that makes me feel like, "well, at least *that* isn't my life".

If you are on this itch page, eyeing up this poem, I am begging you, *please* read (or listen to!) Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.  This poem is one of the most creative, exciting, unique pieces of sci-fi we've ever read. I just love this poem so much.

all right, it took an extra evening for my (more-tech-knowing) gf to do some audio magic to give it nicer metadata and make the files smaller, but I finally got it uploaded, here it is: https://neonpixii.itch.io/cwkb-mp3. If you need me to change any of the wording on that page, let me know. 

And if you do ever feel the desire in the future to instead host these files directly on your own itch page, please feel free to just do so (I do feel kinda awkward/sheepish hosting something I didn't make under my own itch username).

for my own ease of listening on a ipod with limited storage space and without internet, (and also because i'm a platform-pessimist) i downloaded the vods, pulled out the audio, and split them up into individual books (with almost no further editing aside from making them louder, adding media player metadata, cutting the very largest chunks of dead air, and iirc one moment of chat moderation being removed). 

would it be okay if i linked to a zip file of them here in a comment, for anyone else who'd prefer or need an offline version? (or, i guess alternatively, i could send them to you, and you could host them on your itch as an "interrim audiobook", if you wanted that, because to be honest the easiest way i as a nontechnical person can imagine hosting so many megabytes of audio anyways is via a for-free-only, extremely-unofficial, go-support-the-original-author itch page)

thank you!!

you basically have convergently evolved the brainworm i had while reading the tain, where we were daydreaming a fergus mac roich or cu chulainn like character, one that is so bombastic and hedonistic and unrepentantly horny and problematic, as a Big Dick Energy trans girl, except u actually went and wrote it instead of just daydreaming about it like me and now *i* get to enjoy my brainworm come to life, and it is the most  irish mythology thing i have read in a while besides actual irish mythology

(we feel like alot of stuff that cites irish myth as an inspiration frequently feels like it bears very little resemblance to actual irish myth, which in our experience reading what we have,  irish myth kinda feels less like "celtic earth goddess matriarchy mysterious fae in lush forests" of pop culture and more like a long series of extremely irreverent yet oddly compelling Dudes Rock slapstick moments, underlaid by a deep attention to geography and moments of genuine, honest, intense feeling).  the image of a gleaming sunbright army of motorcycles across the martian landscape just slots in so well with my mental model of the feeling of the world of the tain, if it were transported to the distant future.  the cyborgs, the hounds, they have the same kind of characteristic grotequeness that cu chulainn has.

i love the way this story displays the same layered nature of stuff like the tain, different "strata" of stories.  the translator's notes are great, and also the usage of little stock phrasings common in medieval irish manuscripts like ni anse/"not difficult".  i hope we get to see some songs/poems and especially some rosc-like passages in future chapters, that stuff was so compelling to me in the Tain, even tho i know major aspects of it were lost in translation

(excuse my lack of diacritics, my laptop cant type them)

oh my stars someone, went and wrote something that somehow feels even more *laser targeted* at me and my interests than even Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright.

i've read The Táin (primarily the Carson translation, with some dabbling in the Kinsella translation) and enjoyed it alot, and I would like to know, how would you recommend reading the rest of the ulster cycle?

will you save an audio recordings of the complete reading (or twitch vods or whatever)? i know with tea breaks, chat interactions, and inevitable slipups it would hardly be an audiobook-quality thing but it would be nice to have at least some sort of audio version of CWKB available for folks who'd prefer to hear the poem than read it eyeballsly

this is one of the coolest/most out-there ideas for a BoB game i've ever seen, and it makes me wish i had friends interested in shape-note singing that i could play it with

will there ever be a print edition of this game? (maybe bundled with going rogue?)

THANK YOU OMG

will you ever consider making a epub version of this story? (or porting it to ao3 or somewhere else that supports downloading as epubs?)

epub is a matter of accessibility for me. pdfs are very difficult for me to read. i really want to read this story but i basically can't as a pdf :c

this is so wonderful, we especially are excited to try it out for "solo" play. 

btw, would you ever consider making a verison with a easier-to-read font?  we find the super ornate font hard to understand.  either way, thanks for making this! it's lovely.

I really appreciate this game.  I played a relatively short game, with only two confidants, and got a "good" ending with nobody leaving me when they found out my changeling nature.   I wasnt expecting myself to be so strongly affected by it, emotionally, and yet, I was STRONGLY affected.  Probably because I put my character thru situations similar to what I experienced growing up, oops.

Its an emotionally intense game, and its important to be gentle with yourself if you play it and not bite off more than you could chew.

I'm just always happy to see autistic art, so I bought this game twice, once on its own and once in the fundraiser unsale bundle.  Thank you for making this game <3.

Here is our character sheet.  Our apologies for our messy handwriting and unorthodox switching of writing directions.

edit: Oh, the itch comments section formatting seems to elongate images.  Thats frusturating. It seems like if you open the image in a new tab tho, it displays normally.

this is so so so so so so so so so so so so good like i cant overstate how good and nice this is

idk im not good with words but thank you so very very much this art feels good to look at i love all the nice colors and cute textures and stuff 

i hope you make more stuff like this because i would love to buy more stuff like this! 

one of my favorite things was seeing nat & lexie's cameo on the beach i love nat he's one of my favorite characters of yours it would be cool if you made another comic featuring those two sometime

but yeah like words are hard and this art is good and thank you for making it its really great