Happy 25th Birthday, Infinity Smashed!
Feb. 16th, 2025 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeHey everybody! As we mentioned in the story notes of Inside Girl, we have chosen to unlock the old Infinity Smashed archive... even as most of it will no longer be canon, on account of rebooting the story!
(“Oh, LB, again?” Look, IS has always been the old junked car in the yard that we are forever tinkering with and insisting will totally go somewhere someday. Comes with the territory.)
We started writing Infinity Smashed in middle school (fear not, none of THOSE are in the archive). Those of you who’ve read our old short comic, the Greatest American Novel of ALL TIME! know that it was a massive stew of everything Tiny Us thought was cool, but it was more than that. It was also a way to hang onto and discuss memories of each other and noncorporeal events, however fictionalized and distorted. Until their rejoining us, Rawlin, Bob, and Grey’s only records of existing were in Infinity Smashed. (Mac and Biff barely do better—Mac has ONE five-word margin note and Biff one dream journal entry.)
As we tried to delete all inconvenient memories and Frankenstein ourself into a normal cis straight singlet person, IS went dead as a project. We had written ourself into a corner but couldn’t bear to make any changes, and we didn’t know why. (It was because now it was our only records supply of many things.) We told ourself that IS was just an embarrassing childish thing we SHOULD leave behind, but still felt a loss.
In roughly 2010, years into our selves-awareness, we hesitantly began to reboot the project, but it was The Homeless Year that really brought IS roaring back like an indignant garbage phoenix: “did you think you could FORGET ME?!” But we still couldn’t bear to make the major changes needed to the childhood drafts; we worked around it by focusing on events before, after, and around them. (This is why the archive is such a bizarre mishmash, overwhelmingly of books 3-4 of a fuzzily-planned four book series; 1-2 were what we made as kids.)
We were still stuck in the same corner we’d written ourself into as kids, and in 2021, with Rogan’s social justice meltdown, everything was locked down as Terminally Flawed and the project went fallow again.
Now here we are in 2025. Another time of duress has begun, and once again, the trash phoenix rises with a screech of indignation. Our brain has made major headway into horking up the memories the childhood IS drafts had coded and contained, which means we can finally let go of our death grip on those drafts as How The Story Must Be, even when it long since stopped making any sense.
Which means we can finally start properly writing the story from the beginning... even though that beginning now starts with the Bob and Grey book, Found Wanting. That book remains "canon."
Despite Infinity Smashed's weird mythic status for our brain, we still prefer people read it and treat it as fiction. Yes, the story does involve people who now live here, and the story does contain some events that did sorta kinda happen to them, but fiction is not real life, and even those events that DID transpire were over twenty years ago. Bob and Grey were in their forties in Found Wanting; now they're around seventy. Mac was a straight twenty-seven-year-old butch himbo when he died, and Biff was drunk, violent beige trash in his late teens to his early twenties; now they're both in their forties. All are in very different places in their lives. Infinity Smashed is a story; it is not their "source" or their "canon." We write the story according to what they're okay with; there are certain things all of them have requested we not discuss. It's why Mac only says one line, off-screen, and dies. It's why Grey's family life is mostly unstated. It's why Biff will never, ever get laid in Infinity Smashed.
Bob and Grey at the time of Found Wanting...
...and Bob and Grey now.
Mac around the time of Red Roses, Old Horses...
...and Mac now. (with bonus Rogan)
Biff at the time of his first appearance in Infinity Smashed (IMMEDIATELY after Found Wanting)...
...and Biff now (with bonus Rogan).
We aren’t sure what’s going to happen with this lumpy old project. But we hope you enjoy what we come up with.
Oh, and those of you who are here for the nonfiction mental health stuff, don’t worry. We aren’t stopping that at all. We have always preferred to switch between fiction and nonfiction, resting and recharging one by working the other. You’ll still get your write-ups of multi slapfights of yore.
(“Oh, LB, again?” Look, IS has always been the old junked car in the yard that we are forever tinkering with and insisting will totally go somewhere someday. Comes with the territory.)
We started writing Infinity Smashed in middle school (fear not, none of THOSE are in the archive). Those of you who’ve read our old short comic, the Greatest American Novel of ALL TIME! know that it was a massive stew of everything Tiny Us thought was cool, but it was more than that. It was also a way to hang onto and discuss memories of each other and noncorporeal events, however fictionalized and distorted. Until their rejoining us, Rawlin, Bob, and Grey’s only records of existing were in Infinity Smashed. (Mac and Biff barely do better—Mac has ONE five-word margin note and Biff one dream journal entry.)
As we tried to delete all inconvenient memories and Frankenstein ourself into a normal cis straight singlet person, IS went dead as a project. We had written ourself into a corner but couldn’t bear to make any changes, and we didn’t know why. (It was because now it was our only records supply of many things.) We told ourself that IS was just an embarrassing childish thing we SHOULD leave behind, but still felt a loss.
In roughly 2010, years into our selves-awareness, we hesitantly began to reboot the project, but it was The Homeless Year that really brought IS roaring back like an indignant garbage phoenix: “did you think you could FORGET ME?!” But we still couldn’t bear to make the major changes needed to the childhood drafts; we worked around it by focusing on events before, after, and around them. (This is why the archive is such a bizarre mishmash, overwhelmingly of books 3-4 of a fuzzily-planned four book series; 1-2 were what we made as kids.)
We were still stuck in the same corner we’d written ourself into as kids, and in 2021, with Rogan’s social justice meltdown, everything was locked down as Terminally Flawed and the project went fallow again.
Now here we are in 2025. Another time of duress has begun, and once again, the trash phoenix rises with a screech of indignation. Our brain has made major headway into horking up the memories the childhood IS drafts had coded and contained, which means we can finally let go of our death grip on those drafts as How The Story Must Be, even when it long since stopped making any sense.
Which means we can finally start properly writing the story from the beginning... even though that beginning now starts with the Bob and Grey book, Found Wanting. That book remains "canon."
Despite Infinity Smashed's weird mythic status for our brain, we still prefer people read it and treat it as fiction. Yes, the story does involve people who now live here, and the story does contain some events that did sorta kinda happen to them, but fiction is not real life, and even those events that DID transpire were over twenty years ago. Bob and Grey were in their forties in Found Wanting; now they're around seventy. Mac was a straight twenty-seven-year-old butch himbo when he died, and Biff was drunk, violent beige trash in his late teens to his early twenties; now they're both in their forties. All are in very different places in their lives. Infinity Smashed is a story; it is not their "source" or their "canon." We write the story according to what they're okay with; there are certain things all of them have requested we not discuss. It's why Mac only says one line, off-screen, and dies. It's why Grey's family life is mostly unstated. It's why Biff will never, ever get laid in Infinity Smashed.
Bob and Grey at the time of Found Wanting...
...and Bob and Grey now.
Mac around the time of Red Roses, Old Horses...
...and Mac now. (with bonus Rogan)
Biff at the time of his first appearance in Infinity Smashed (IMMEDIATELY after Found Wanting)...
...and Biff now (with bonus Rogan).
We aren’t sure what’s going to happen with this lumpy old project. But we hope you enjoy what we come up with.
Oh, and those of you who are here for the nonfiction mental health stuff, don’t worry. We aren’t stopping that at all. We have always preferred to switch between fiction and nonfiction, resting and recharging one by working the other. You’ll still get your write-ups of multi slapfights of yore.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 06:59 am (UTC)Thanks for making it clear where you stand on Infinity Smashed's relationship with your actual lives! As a reader, it helps to have that boundary. Like, a lot of people write fiction that's based on stuff that actually happened. But that label of "this is inspired by real stuff but it's fiction" shapes how you respond to it.
I love all the pictures of where everyone is now. Seems like everyone's a lot happier than they were twenty years ago!
Trash phoenix <3
no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 03:24 pm (UTC)It doesn’t help that we first started posting IS stuff here, no IS headmates or memories were around except Mac the redshirt, so it was no big deal. But as the years passed and more and more came back, we had a major problem. Part of the lockdown was to buy time to figure out what to do about that!
And yeah, everyone is a lot happier now. Nobody’s closeted, nobody’s trapped, times can be hard but we’re together.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 08:24 am (UTC)I came in in the 2010s where yeah, it was in its "mostly books 3 and 4 snippets" phase and it's still meaningful and enjoyable and fantastic. Unsurprising that it's so many magnitudes more meaningful to you all, but just wanted to emphasise that no matter how much you have ever felt it was a garbage-can mess, even in its "mess" phases it's had impact and meaning by being released out into the world.
I am so excited to see how this goes! Really, really looking forward to it! <3
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Date: 2025-02-17 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-18 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-18 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-19 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-21 03:39 pm (UTC)