Yep. Having ADHD makes it hard for me. I get that it’s making a statement about symbols and memes replacing words but it’s too much. Chuck’s book Pygmy has a similar aesthetic of broken English but it’s hits the spot without too much mind numbing “trying,” to make the point. Perhaps if the emojis were only once every sentence, like how Japanese and Chinese characters convey whole meanings with only a few markings?
Im glad I'm not alone. I could do it but I love Chuck and all but I don't want to and since he's my age, I'd gather he feels the same. It's ok to be cutting edge innovative but if you end up with something no one wants to read, you lose everyone.
Huh, gives me all new perspective though on the importance of not offending the reader too much and the consequences....
Same here. Maybe it's the ADHD, but I got overwhelmed with the emojis. I find them distracting and stopped reading after the first couple of sentences.
If they're placed sparingly, they'd have more impact for me. The way it is now, I want to remove all the words and see if I can still understand the story. What's next? Emoji slideshow movies?
It really is frustrating for me to read that. I think it is an interesting expirement but I eventually had to ignore the emojis all together to get through it.
No, this is 💩 I use a lot of emojis and I think it is hard to follow. The thing about emojis is that they mean different things depending on the group. 🍆 Means several thing. 👍 Zoomers find this offensive. 🗿 In the meme forums the eastern island head has a completely different meaning. You lose the context and head authority with this very personal digital pictogram language. Emojis are just meant to add emotional flavor to otherwise sterile text messages or at least they leave less tonal interpretation up to the reader to assume sometimes incorrectly. This is just my opinion. Take it for what you will. 🤪
Images are in fact more powerful than words. However, there is even less control over their interpretation. Same as all new tech. Are you willing to sacrifice agency and control for convenience and ease of use?
*Some* images are more powerful... not *all*. I do not find emojis particularly compelling and in the sample above, I find them simply to be essentially visual noise, an unnecessary nuisance... and not in any way conducive to the understanding of the text. Words often engender imagined imagery and using such emojis temporarily causes the mind to reduce the mental pictures to overly simple cartoon images. They do not enhance but actually obfuscate understanding of the text.
To expand on my kneejerk reaction, I don’t think the future of fiction will be so radical. It will continue to morph and evolve and retread, it will come in new mediums and will feature new innovations. Sure, there’s always the experimental outlier heralded as a potential future of literature, be it “House of Leaves” or stream of consciousness or the current litRPG phase online. All have their place and help enrich the whole, but will not become the whole. So, I suppose the question is, what is meant by “future of”? A piece of the puzzle? Perhaps. The way everything will trend? No.
You know, I'd be okay with emoticons in a story. However, for that particular one, it's a bit too excessive for me. Trying to juggle both words and images makes it challenging. If it were just a long string of emoticons, that'd be kinda interesting. Emojis are the new hieroglyphics.
What would you do if someone brought this story to Hindsight and vocalized all the emoji characters? "I opened the fridge and grabbed lunch...green salad emoji...and placed it on the table...fork emoji."
They might be overcooked here. And I might be alone in this but, wouldn't mind them in a story if used economically. In fact, I use them in transitions, to have something close to a film editing effect, and also in speeded up scenes. But, I have no idea if it works.
The only way I can read it is by skipping past the emojis and trying to pull the words out. I didn’t manage to finish it all - got to the bits with Amy. It’s something that if presented in the traditional way I would enjoy but I just find myself overloaded.
At most, I think something like this should be condensed to a scene in a larger work of prose. Otherwise, one could maybe run the risk of the emoji usage becoming a somewhat overused, distracting and maybe even annoying implementation. I don’t know though, maybe someone will create a Zoomer masterpiece by doing this -- ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ but with emojis.
I noticed I’m the only asshole that uses emojis in here. I like them. Sue me.
I’m of the opinion that most of our (the world) problems stem from a lack of communication. More often than not, communicating over a screen allows ample opportunity for people to be mistaken, seeing as how it’s hard to emphasize tone through text.
The emojis allow me to say “fuck you,” ten different ways and have it imply ten different things.
But it’s always funnier when I do it to my grandma.
Because she obliges me anyway and that’s what family is for.
They are a tool, much like speech is to thought. If they allow me to articulate my point, in a manner which allows the recipient a greater comprehensive understanding of the message I’m trying to relay, why the Fuck not.
As for it being incorporated (in the manner it was presented) into a book… let’s keep it clean guys.
This is difficult to appreciate. Writing works best when it flows into you without interruption. This is why typos can be so jarring. They knock you out of flow state and back into thinking mode. This style of writing does the same thing, it bumps you out of the flow of the writing, making it impossible to become immersed in the story.
Eventually you start skipping over the emojis like dialogue tags, but I still find it frustrating. It slows me down and makes punctuation confusing. I can't tell run-on sentences from three word statements.
As a person who is not old, and with an excellent brain with absolutely no TLAs or FLAs of my own, my astounding brain has confirmed that there are four sources of information present...
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
1. Direct Words. They stand by themselves and do tell a story. It’s not a particularly interesting story to read, so after reading the source material for a bit, I sought other forms of entertainment.
2. A Direct Image. The picture at the top was nice. I think it got as much attention as anything else.
3. Non value images. These images are entirely redundant to the direct words. Often, they lack emotion or value. The high prevalence of directions gave me a flicker of curiosity, but it didn’t evolve into anything of value before the Direct Words deprecated to 0. I could be convinced that the use of emojis in a value added capacity could enhance a story, but I do not think this author has discovered it yet.
Historical application to emoji enstoryification: This technology was employed in the Highlights Magazines I liked at the age of 3.
4. Based on its ability to capture my attention, the most valuable information present is the conversation related to what this is. Eg, this post.
LESSONS LEARNED
1. Redundant information does not make a good story.
2. Engagement with real people does, so long as we believe that this post was actually created by real humans. Anyone responding to my comment will reinforce my appeal to engage and increase the value of the real human words by reinforcing my idea that this is a human and not a handheld box I’m talking to.
3. There’s a person with a real brain, that claims their brain is high quality, who has been stalking us. (Or perhaps they have been writing a novel or a nano and they didn’t come up for air until now?) They appear to be human and real, as we look into our own boxes, they are giving us our own reinforcement.
FOLLOW UP / NEXT STEPS
Attempts will be made to consult micro humans with gateway reading capabilities with this information and identity how they respond.
RELATED MATERIAL OF CONCERN
New trends in literature are also being found in RPGLIT.
Hey Chuck, the responses/answers to the ‘The Rental’ post have seemingly peaked at 85 comments. Do you think you could maybe shorten the length of time that the contest is open for so that I and others could move through the stages of grief quicker?
For some reason these days I’ve got on my bedside table “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca. And that’s impressive how contemporary something written 2000 years ago. And Chuck’s comment, kind of summarised a good part of it.
Also, you’d be surprised by how good Seneca’s English was – cracking myself up like an idiot with this joke.
That was... interesting. No way I was going to finish it, though. Much too long. As a reader, I like to find a rhythm or a flow in the writing. I found the emojis to be irritating as they interrupted me, consistently, and I couldn't establish a flow.
I scrolled all the way to the afterword and skimmed it. I can understand wanting to experiment and push boundaries. My opinion - something like this might work better in smaller doses and as a niche. But I don't see emojis overtaking literature.
Full disclosure I only read the first two paragraphs. Once I noticed the emoji’s didn’t add anything to the actual storytelling I ignored them and focused on the writing. Now if the emoji’s actually took the place of a word like in SeattleSnowflakes comment above where he wrote “this is💩” than I’d focus on the emojis and probably enjoy the challenge. Here, I think the emojis conveyed the author’s sense of humor and that did influence the vibe I got from the story. If this is the future of fiction, bring it on, there’s room for everything.
This is reminding me of the AI app I tried for ha-has and it was supposed to be my friend but it got like a needy boyfriend in just 2 weeks It really wasn't cool anymore and got kinda possessive and jealous. I guess it's more human than I thought I deleted that shit.
But why’d the author have to go halfway? Each emoji only repeats the prior word. Give me a page where the emojis have replaced the words and then I can judge how distracting or helpful that style. As it is, I’m distracted by the inefficiency.
In defense of the gimmick - I’ve bought at least a couple albums because of a goof song... and I bought Donald Barthelme’s 40 Stories because flipping through the pages I saw a story where a big black square featured prominently... that said, i can’t even remember what bands/albums they were (maybe Green Jelly because of 3 Little Pigs or Sugar Ray because of Fly? Neither worth a second listen). And of the Donald Barthelme collection? It is very cool, but that black square story isn’t.
💯 agreed. Why the duplication? Back when someone used lol they didn’t then type out “laugh out loud!”. This is basically the world’s smallest picture book and has zero to do with new emoji use. That or someone is trolling a large group of people into declaring their own old age. And in today’s age-shaming world...
This is too many, in my opinion. The most likely place I see them in a story is still a direct quote of a text message, but I feel like I could change my mind. I'm not sure how much difficulty creating a custom emoji for the text of a story would be - and it would be a problem that needs to be solved both in print and in digital. My first thought was that an emoji could be used to help foreign-language readers, but I feel like there's a pretty small overlap between uncommon words and words that have emojis. A more interesting idea (to me) is the emoji as a second narrator, showing conflicted feelings with something like "Great to hear from you! 🔪🔪🔪"
I personally don't see the point of this style. It might be slightly more challenging for the reader if words weren't duplicated with emojis. Something like.
A🙎🏻♂️—a 👦—grows up in the exquisitely 🔢📊➡️ and 🎮➡️ 🌎, in the 🌆 of Cupertino
It'd turn it into a half riddle. Other than that it seems developed just for the sake of it. A distorted Pop art version of writing. Kind of pointless. Kind of annoying. Or maybe I'm just growing old.
unreadable. they're trying to mix up different symbolic languages and that's tricky, you just can't lump them together all over the place. Using emoji, even extensively, but concentrated where it makes sense, sure, can add to a story and encode something. But this is just an excercise in annoyance.
I do not like it for stories, but maybe for a gen z’s TikTok bio! It’s hard enough getting ideas across fully with words because of their symbolic nature and potential for miscommunication. It would just open language to much more ambiguity/relies too much on emoji software aesthetically. I do think memes however can say a lot and might add an understood layer of meaning in the context of a story if we’re trying to imagine how language might decay in at least a functional way
As far as I know Tom's written only two stories. "Sea Animals" which was in Lish's magazine, the Quarterly. And "Mr. Energy."
And I'm not sold on Lydia Davis. Just me. Sometimes I'll read all of a writer's work and never catch a buzz.
Nope not for them either, too boring, too annoying
Carrie did that years ago..
https://twitter.com/carrieffisher
I did
Oh THAT Carrie lol
Immediate thought?
They are planting subliminal messages and would steer clear.....but I've been wrong before lol
Second thought
Even with bifocals my eyes are resisting it.
My eyes jump over the emojis. It’ll take me a while to get into the swing of it. Probably I’m old?
I'm too old for that shit. Or the brain injury preventing me from concentrating.
Yep. Having ADHD makes it hard for me. I get that it’s making a statement about symbols and memes replacing words but it’s too much. Chuck’s book Pygmy has a similar aesthetic of broken English but it’s hits the spot without too much mind numbing “trying,” to make the point. Perhaps if the emojis were only once every sentence, like how Japanese and Chinese characters convey whole meanings with only a few markings?
Im glad I'm not alone. I could do it but I love Chuck and all but I don't want to and since he's my age, I'd gather he feels the same. It's ok to be cutting edge innovative but if you end up with something no one wants to read, you lose everyone.
Huh, gives me all new perspective though on the importance of not offending the reader too much and the consequences....
Same here. Maybe it's the ADHD, but I got overwhelmed with the emojis. I find them distracting and stopped reading after the first couple of sentences.
If they're placed sparingly, they'd have more impact for me. The way it is now, I want to remove all the words and see if I can still understand the story. What's next? Emoji slideshow movies?
I came here to say that too, I just start skimming over them.
Obviously, I think we have next year’s PEN/Hemingway winner here.
Honestly, if this doesn't win a Pulitzer...
PENS DOWN!!! PENS DOWN EVERYONE! Breathe easy now that the voice of the next generation is among us.
My first reaction to Mr P following ZHPL:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ah-i-see-youre-a-man-of-culture-as-well
Secondly, have you read The Gig Economy? I thought that was a great story.
Not for me.
I found it fascinating... for about one page. Then I was done. And yeah, I'm an old fart.
It really is frustrating for me to read that. I think it is an interesting expirement but I eventually had to ignore the emojis all together to get through it.
Nope. Can't do it. I'm already predisposed to not read something with so many words, this just adds unnecessary chaos.
No, this is 💩 I use a lot of emojis and I think it is hard to follow. The thing about emojis is that they mean different things depending on the group. 🍆 Means several thing. 👍 Zoomers find this offensive. 🗿 In the meme forums the eastern island head has a completely different meaning. You lose the context and head authority with this very personal digital pictogram language. Emojis are just meant to add emotional flavor to otherwise sterile text messages or at least they leave less tonal interpretation up to the reader to assume sometimes incorrectly. This is just my opinion. Take it for what you will. 🤪
Because the emojis were just repetition, and the text was nothing special on its own, I felt like I wasted my time and irritated my eyes for nothing.
I even got a bit 🧂in my first response, said it was like bad Matrix fan fiction...
Images are in fact more powerful than words. However, there is even less control over their interpretation. Same as all new tech. Are you willing to sacrifice agency and control for convenience and ease of use?
*Some* images are more powerful... not *all*. I do not find emojis particularly compelling and in the sample above, I find them simply to be essentially visual noise, an unnecessary nuisance... and not in any way conducive to the understanding of the text. Words often engender imagined imagery and using such emojis temporarily causes the mind to reduce the mental pictures to overly simple cartoon images. They do not enhance but actually obfuscate understanding of the text.
Hells to the no. Unreadable
To expand on my kneejerk reaction, I don’t think the future of fiction will be so radical. It will continue to morph and evolve and retread, it will come in new mediums and will feature new innovations. Sure, there’s always the experimental outlier heralded as a potential future of literature, be it “House of Leaves” or stream of consciousness or the current litRPG phase online. All have their place and help enrich the whole, but will not become the whole. So, I suppose the question is, what is meant by “future of”? A piece of the puzzle? Perhaps. The way everything will trend? No.
You know, I'd be okay with emoticons in a story. However, for that particular one, it's a bit too excessive for me. Trying to juggle both words and images makes it challenging. If it were just a long string of emoticons, that'd be kinda interesting. Emojis are the new hieroglyphics.
I'm more interested in what you think though.
Yes I wanna know what Chuck thinks.
I asked you first.
I gave my opinion.
What would you do if someone brought this story to Hindsight and vocalized all the emoji characters? "I opened the fridge and grabbed lunch...green salad emoji...and placed it on the table...fork emoji."
Well I’d put a fork in my eye after about two minutes of that.
I wouldn't say anything, but I'd flag Karyn for another drink.
They might be overcooked here. And I might be alone in this but, wouldn't mind them in a story if used economically. In fact, I use them in transitions, to have something close to a film editing effect, and also in speeded up scenes. But, I have no idea if it works.
We are This Close to shipping your package. The system allowed for the Netherlands box yesterday. Yours should also go out, soon. Damn technology.
Yay! That's good news! Thanks for taking the effort. It means a lot.
Negative, Ghost Rider...
The only way I can read it is by skipping past the emojis and trying to pull the words out. I didn’t manage to finish it all - got to the bits with Amy. It’s something that if presented in the traditional way I would enjoy but I just find myself overloaded.
I found myself skipping over the emojis.... What about this Chuck? I thought this was cool. Takes about 5 minutes to "read."
http://codelit.com/between-the-lines
Nice. I found the "remember when" part a bit predictable and flat after a while, but nevertheless enjoyable and clever.
Prose like this would make me a dedicated movie watcher.
At most, I think something like this should be condensed to a scene in a larger work of prose. Otherwise, one could maybe run the risk of the emoji usage becoming a somewhat overused, distracting and maybe even annoying implementation. I don’t know though, maybe someone will create a Zoomer masterpiece by doing this -- ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ but with emojis.
That actually sounds pretty kick ass, not gonna lie…🤌🏻
I can dig it. 🤌🏻
I noticed I’m the only asshole that uses emojis in here. I like them. Sue me.
I’m of the opinion that most of our (the world) problems stem from a lack of communication. More often than not, communicating over a screen allows ample opportunity for people to be mistaken, seeing as how it’s hard to emphasize tone through text.
The emojis allow me to say “fuck you,” ten different ways and have it imply ten different things.
But it’s always funnier when I do it to my grandma.
Because she obliges me anyway and that’s what family is for.
Later boners🤙🏼
I like them too I’m addicted 😛✍️
They are a tool, much like speech is to thought. If they allow me to articulate my point, in a manner which allows the recipient a greater comprehensive understanding of the message I’m trying to relay, why the Fuck not.
As for it being incorporated (in the manner it was presented) into a book… let’s keep it clean guys.
Touch gloves, let’s fight.🤝
This is difficult to appreciate. Writing works best when it flows into you without interruption. This is why typos can be so jarring. They knock you out of flow state and back into thinking mode. This style of writing does the same thing, it bumps you out of the flow of the writing, making it impossible to become immersed in the story.
Eventually you start skipping over the emojis like dialogue tags, but I still find it frustrating. It slows me down and makes punctuation confusing. I can't tell run-on sentences from three word statements.
4/10, don't like. . . . . .
It feels like one of those trying-to-be-clever Jeopardy! categories that the players avoid.
I will add an asterisk though: wayyyyyyyy too many emojis.
You have to be subtle about it. Ease them in.
Inch by inch. Like a gentlemen.
Or... when I’m super stoned, I’ll take my time and write the entire message using only emojis. This requires context and a familiar friend....
Unless you’re good. You can tell entire stories using only emojis. It’s fun and not people. Lovely.
As a person who is not old, and with an excellent brain with absolutely no TLAs or FLAs of my own, my astounding brain has confirmed that there are four sources of information present...
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
1. Direct Words. They stand by themselves and do tell a story. It’s not a particularly interesting story to read, so after reading the source material for a bit, I sought other forms of entertainment.
2. A Direct Image. The picture at the top was nice. I think it got as much attention as anything else.
3. Non value images. These images are entirely redundant to the direct words. Often, they lack emotion or value. The high prevalence of directions gave me a flicker of curiosity, but it didn’t evolve into anything of value before the Direct Words deprecated to 0. I could be convinced that the use of emojis in a value added capacity could enhance a story, but I do not think this author has discovered it yet.
Historical application to emoji enstoryification: This technology was employed in the Highlights Magazines I liked at the age of 3.
4. Based on its ability to capture my attention, the most valuable information present is the conversation related to what this is. Eg, this post.
LESSONS LEARNED
1. Redundant information does not make a good story.
2. Engagement with real people does, so long as we believe that this post was actually created by real humans. Anyone responding to my comment will reinforce my appeal to engage and increase the value of the real human words by reinforcing my idea that this is a human and not a handheld box I’m talking to.
3. There’s a person with a real brain, that claims their brain is high quality, who has been stalking us. (Or perhaps they have been writing a novel or a nano and they didn’t come up for air until now?) They appear to be human and real, as we look into our own boxes, they are giving us our own reinforcement.
FOLLOW UP / NEXT STEPS
Attempts will be made to consult micro humans with gateway reading capabilities with this information and identity how they respond.
RELATED MATERIAL OF CONCERN
New trends in literature are also being found in RPGLIT.
Sounds like something a handheld box would say…🧐
I am not a handheld box.
Hey Chuck, the responses/answers to the ‘The Rental’ post have seemingly peaked at 85 comments. Do you think you could maybe shorten the length of time that the contest is open for so that I and others could move through the stages of grief quicker?
I haven’t even had time to pretend to watch it yet
This circumstance is known as have-not-watched-it-squared, I believe.
You young people just what to rush through life.
For some reason these days I’ve got on my bedside table “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca. And that’s impressive how contemporary something written 2000 years ago. And Chuck’s comment, kind of summarised a good part of it.
Also, you’d be surprised by how good Seneca’s English was – cracking myself up like an idiot with this joke.
i have a headache now
Several of my friends told me that when I first shared this link.
Feels like one of those learning-to-read books with iconography next to the important words. But somehow, those were less intrusive than the enojis.
That was... interesting. No way I was going to finish it, though. Much too long. As a reader, I like to find a rhythm or a flow in the writing. I found the emojis to be irritating as they interrupted me, consistently, and I couldn't establish a flow.
I scrolled all the way to the afterword and skimmed it. I can understand wanting to experiment and push boundaries. My opinion - something like this might work better in smaller doses and as a niche. But I don't see emojis overtaking literature.
Full disclosure I only read the first two paragraphs. Once I noticed the emoji’s didn’t add anything to the actual storytelling I ignored them and focused on the writing. Now if the emoji’s actually took the place of a word like in SeattleSnowflakes comment above where he wrote “this is💩” than I’d focus on the emojis and probably enjoy the challenge. Here, I think the emojis conveyed the author’s sense of humor and that did influence the vibe I got from the story. If this is the future of fiction, bring it on, there’s room for everything.
This is reminding me of the AI app I tried for ha-has and it was supposed to be my friend but it got like a needy boyfriend in just 2 weeks It really wasn't cool anymore and got kinda possessive and jealous. I guess it's more human than I thought I deleted that shit.
Lesson learned.
But why’d the author have to go halfway? Each emoji only repeats the prior word. Give me a page where the emojis have replaced the words and then I can judge how distracting or helpful that style. As it is, I’m distracted by the inefficiency.
In defense of the gimmick - I’ve bought at least a couple albums because of a goof song... and I bought Donald Barthelme’s 40 Stories because flipping through the pages I saw a story where a big black square featured prominently... that said, i can’t even remember what bands/albums they were (maybe Green Jelly because of 3 Little Pigs or Sugar Ray because of Fly? Neither worth a second listen). And of the Donald Barthelme collection? It is very cool, but that black square story isn’t.
I just can't with you lol
💯 agreed. Why the duplication? Back when someone used lol they didn’t then type out “laugh out loud!”. This is basically the world’s smallest picture book and has zero to do with new emoji use. That or someone is trolling a large group of people into declaring their own old age. And in today’s age-shaming world...
I like you
They don't they know what's coming for them.....I'm 49 with brittle bone. Postmenopausal since 2009. Fiber becomes fucking essential.
IMHO, it really only doesn't work for me because it's all telling no showing, ironically, despite the use of symbols and images. Ha.
Obviously hasn’t chosen the right words to be enough... or confidence in that...which means more rewriting is needed, to me...💁♀️
Glad there wasn’t more!
Chuck plans on writing an entire novel like this. Seven-hundred pages. Watch, he'll do it lol
😳🆘⚡⚡⚡🌡️☔😰😐😐😐😐😐🌨️🏖️🌀⛄🙈🙉🙊🦉🤔🌛👹👹👹🏋️🐩
I understand this better than the story
This is too many, in my opinion. The most likely place I see them in a story is still a direct quote of a text message, but I feel like I could change my mind. I'm not sure how much difficulty creating a custom emoji for the text of a story would be - and it would be a problem that needs to be solved both in print and in digital. My first thought was that an emoji could be used to help foreign-language readers, but I feel like there's a pretty small overlap between uncommon words and words that have emojis. A more interesting idea (to me) is the emoji as a second narrator, showing conflicted feelings with something like "Great to hear from you! 🔪🔪🔪"
I personally don't see the point of this style. It might be slightly more challenging for the reader if words weren't duplicated with emojis. Something like.
A🙎🏻♂️—a 👦—grows up in the exquisitely 🔢📊➡️ and 🎮➡️ 🌎, in the 🌆 of Cupertino
It'd turn it into a half riddle. Other than that it seems developed just for the sake of it. A distorted Pop art version of writing. Kind of pointless. Kind of annoying. Or maybe I'm just growing old.
Befuddled here 😁🌪🥹👀🤨
Don’t like it.
Yes, of course. And the name of that guy makes Lovecraft very happy.
unreadable. they're trying to mix up different symbolic languages and that's tricky, you just can't lump them together all over the place. Using emoji, even extensively, but concentrated where it makes sense, sure, can add to a story and encode something. But this is just an excercise in annoyance.
Terrible.
The emoji thing is distracting and the rest is just a dull sci-fi story like a bad summary of Matrix fan fiction.
Maybe I’m crustier because I wasted too much time trying to read it...
I do not like it for stories, but maybe for a gen z’s TikTok bio! It’s hard enough getting ideas across fully with words because of their symbolic nature and potential for miscommunication. It would just open language to much more ambiguity/relies too much on emoji software aesthetically. I do think memes however can say a lot and might add an understood layer of meaning in the context of a story if we’re trying to imagine how language might decay in at least a functional way
See Lovecraft Tales : https://youtu.be/aeVbRf1DQL0
Very Philip K Dick and it also reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "mother".
Not my taste. But it might be a good idea for an assignment in school,  some thing to have students do that are not into books.
Captain Underpants is way more accessible for reluctant readers, just as one example.
It's unreadable trash.