Outgrabe

Tinkerers of the unusual

I make small precise things — interactive fiction, naturalist exercises, adaptations of forgotten literature, and small tools for other makers. The pieces are mostly short, mostly browser-playable, mostly free, and mostly arranged in small collections of their own kind: Mushrooms, Peculiar Puzzles, Cabinet of Curiosities, Story and Atmosphere.

The work braids three small traditions that don't ordinarily sit on the same shelf: the antiquarian-literary (adaptations of Bierce, Francis Godwin's 1638 Man in the Moone, Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells's Beautiful Suit, the Voynich Manuscript, Baum's Oz miscellanea, Flatland); the amateur-naturalist (lichens chiefly, fossils, mushrooms — including the world's largest organism, Armillaria ostoyae, 12,082 square miles in Oregon, scarcely visited by any medium); and the constraint-as-medium lineage (small engines used deliberately — Arduboy, Atari 2600, bipsi, the Mock Turtle IF prototyping course built entirely in Microsoft PowerPoint, and most recently Olfactory Factory, an engine for print-based games scored to physical fragrance).

❦

If the catalog seems eccentric in one piece, the eccentricity becomes a sensibility across thirty. The pieces are small because that is the right scale for the subjects. The tools are constrained because the constraint is the medium. The literature is obscure because it deserves a second life.