3 Games / 3 Hours / 3 Cursed Computers

0:01 This is a discussion of three indie horror games: Proximate Without a Dawn,

0:05 and Dead Letter Department,

0:07 all of which collectively take a little over three hours to play.

0:11 I will not be discussing the endings of any of these games,

0:14 but in terms of spoilers, this video will certainly go over details for each

0:19 title that are treated as reveals within a playthrough.

0:22 Also, I have a new book available,

0:25 but I'm not going to talk any more about that until the end of the video.

0:28 In approximate, a 2024 indie game by developer Cain Maddox,

0:33 you never actually see the world you're navigating.

0:36 You're aware of the fact that you're

0:38 in a small underwater complex with a kitchen,

0:41 a recreation center, a lobby, medical bay.

0:44 You're aware that each of these rooms has the furniture you would expect.

0:48 The bathroom has a sink, the kitchen has food, the bionics center has machines.

0:54 But despite the fact that you'll spend at least an hour

0:57 wandering between these rooms full of things over your playthrough of proximate,

1:01 you will only see one thing a small

1:06 computer strapped to the front of your character's head.

1:09 The computer will see for you.

1:12 You only need to read.

1:15 The SONA visor as we're introduced to it in its own advertising brochure,

1:20 uses proprietary AI tech to determine what

1:23 you're looking at in snowstorms and fires, even in total darkness.

1:29 The visor tells you what it thinks the object

1:31 in front of you is your distance to said object,

1:35 and most interestingly, its percent confidence in the accuracy of that thing.

1:40 So it will tell you that it's 98.6% confident something is an air lock,

1:46 or that it's 92.8% confident something is minced

1:51 beef or 42.2% confidence something is a woman.

1:57 Fortunately, your job isn't contingent on your ability to understand.

2:02 You're little more than a corporate drone

2:04 sent to this complex to recover valuable data.

2:06 After something happened to the entire crew.

2:12 We're sure that's minced beef, right?

2:17 When the game starts, Your goals are simple.

2:20 Interact with data consoles in the different rooms of the complex.

2:25 The mechanical interest comes from navigating using the SONA visor,

2:29 which itself is contingent on a couple interconnected systems.

2:33 You have the word of what you're looking at.

2:35 The cardinal direction you're facing, the distance to each object,

2:39 and to confirm your position in the world, A map of the interconnected rooms.

2:44 You can't move while looking at the map,

2:47 but it's nevertheless an essential part of moving around.

2:49 How else could you reorient yourself if you got lost?

2:54 15 minutes into the game, your SONA visor’s memory gets overloaded.

2:59 Your supervisor takes the liberty of clearing some room in the software for you.

3:05 He deletes your map.

3:08 This is the way proximity actually plays.

3:12 You start each run in your home base.

3:14 Actually a submarine attached to the complex.

3:17 The console there has the only copy of your map.

3:20 You know, you need to get to, let's say, the surgery room.

3:24 So you stare at it and think, okay, I'm going to leave my submarine.

3:27 Head towards the upper right of the lobby,

3:30 keep my shoulder to the wall of coworking,

3:32 and turn right again when I reach the top.

3:34 Walk in a straight line across bionics and then I'll get to surgery.

3:39 And then once I get to surgery and find out what I need,

3:42 certainly not encountering anything distracting or disturbing on the way,

3:46 I'll simply reverse my steps.

3:50 I'll walk right back to my submarine.

3:53 Easy as pie.

3:56 Proximate delights in interrupting these plans.

3:59 Sometimes it's as simple as a room being

4:02 filled with desks that you have to navigate around,

4:04 meaning you can't adhere to your carefully thought out route.

4:08 Or maybe the thing you're looking for doesn't stay still.

4:11 Or maybe you're being moved around all you know is

4:14 that the thing that was a meter away is now five meters away.

4:18 And why is it labeled dog?

4:21 That can't be right.

4:22 We’re at the bottom of the ocean.

4:24 And look, maybe it would be impossible to see down here otherwise.

4:29 Maybe there's some reason a flashlight wouldn't work.

4:32 Maybe billowing sediment on the seafloor

4:34 would cut visibility down to zero regardless.

4:36 But the obvious takeaway of using the SONA visor

4:40 is that this technology is warping your perception of things.

4:44 It can't detect context or atmosphere.

4:47 It can't focus or intuit.

4:49 It creates a depersonalized vision of the world

4:52 through objects and then leaves you to go crazy, filling in the blanks.

4:58 The hook pulling you through your search,

5:00 presuming you don't simply enjoy being a corporate controlled drone,

5:04 is the data you're recovering.

5:06 Your boss says that you're looking for the research

5:09 the people in the underwater complex did,

5:11 but what you're finding is significantly more intimate.

5:14 Stored on these consoles in each room are basically slack conversations,

5:19 group chats, and DMs between the eight

5:22 people who previously inhabited this place.

5:24 And when you read these, you realize that technology warping

5:28 your vision isn't just the mechanical premise of the game,

5:32 it's the entire narrative conceit as well.

5:36 The first piece of person to person communication

5:39 you read in the game directly acknowledges this.

5:42 Ells, a bioengineer in the complex messages Willow a radiologist.

5:47 Season seven just dropped she types.

5:49 Do you want to watch tonight?

5:51 Eyes emoji.

5:52 Willow responds why are you texting me?

5:55 I'm like two desks away from you.

5:58 This thread continues through the game.

6:01 Eight people living in incredibly close quarters who still opt to message

6:06 each other either with polite workplace

6:08 passive aggression or late night internet overfamiliarity,

6:12 or emotionally stunted confessions of love and infuriatingly cryptic dismissals.

6:16 Every communication, no matter how practical or sensitive,

6:21 is sucked dry of its context and tone.

6:24 Everything in proximate is left ripe for misinterpretation

6:27 by all the data the software excludes.

6:34 My first thought while playing Without a Dawn,

6:37 a 2025 title by developer Jesse Makonnen, was wow, neat art style.

6:42 My second thought was, oh cool, someone made a game about my biggest fear.

6:50 Let's start with the first thought.

6:52 Without a Dawn feels a little like Ascii art,

6:55 where people use traditional keyboard characters to draw

6:58 pictures or create headers for their gamefaqs guides.

7:02 It's not actually Ascii, however, because the characters almost exclusively

7:06 numbers keep shifting around the screen.

7:10 The graphics are made out of only three colors just the light, dark, and black.

7:15 And yet the game's images,

7:16 like the first shot of a woman lying on a bed, are surprising in their detail.

7:22 You can see strands of her hair,

7:24 her eyelashes, the way the pillow creases around her.

7:27 And even though she's still, the image moves,

7:31 the numbers that form the world wriggle under and around the specifics.

7:36 Something, a voice, a text, a thought tells her to open her eyes.

7:42 You have a feeling that someone is watching you, It says.

7:45 Someone may be standing behind the window.

7:50 Without a Dawn is a game with options, but not a game with choices.

7:55 You can click to ignore the intruding idea, but you can't really.

8:00 You can say there's no one there.

8:02 You can try and stay in bed, but really, if you want to get on with your sleep,

8:06 get on with your life, there's only one thing to do.

8:10 You stand up, you go to the windows and you open the blinds.

8:15 Every other option is just delaying the inevitable.

8:18 Can you see movement through the cracks in the window blinds?

8:21 The voice asks you, an unfair question

8:23 because the whole screen is swimming in numbers.

8:26 Can you see the shadows shifting?

8:28 It says even though nothing in the image is still.

8:34 And you take a deep breath and you open the blinds and there's nothing

8:38 behind them except for the branches of a tree gently rocking back and forth.

8:42 And you take another deep breath and you close the blinds,

8:45 because even though you needed to know what was behind them,

8:48 you can't sleep if they're open and you go back to bed and you begin to dream.

8:53 And then you meet the man in the gas mask.

9:00 Ascii art has a lot in common with pointillism.

9:04 The image on first blush looks whole.

9:07 But as you get closer and closer to it,

9:09 as you begin to study the technique, the larger structure dissolves.

9:13 The more obvious the brushstrokes are, the blobs of color,

9:17 the smears of paint, the less obvious the idea becomes.

9:22 The difference with Ascii is that each character,

9:25 unlike an individual dot of paint, already holds a meaning.

9:30 The slashes and ampersands and brackets, the size of letters and numbers.

9:35 We're trained to understand these things in conjunction with each other.

9:39 These are pattern making tools, and we are pattern finding creatures and my God.

9:46 Think of all the possible patterns hiding among this larger whole.

9:52 The woman at the center of Without a dawn,

9:54 or at least the voice she can't help hearing, is obsessed with patterns.

10:00 Maybe patterns are obsessed with her.

10:03 She goes to sleep and she sees the man in the gas mask,

10:06 and he asks her how many fingers he's holding behind his back.

10:10 And it's one, six, three, five, 15 in all.

10:14 And for some reason that makes sense.

10:18 You look at him and those numbers in the reflected flames of his goggles,

10:23 but he's not as menacing as he could be.

10:25 He actually reorders his silence for you.

10:28 This is how your intruding voice’s silence looks.

10:32 And this is how the man in the gas mask’s silence looks.

10:36 He organizes it for you.

10:38 That's how considerate he is.

10:40 Five groups of three.

10:42 15 silent crosses.

10:47 In many ways, it's more comfortable being

10:49 with the gas mask man than being awake.

10:52 The game is called without a Dawn,

10:54 and fittingly, you're never even conscious during daylight.

10:58 You wake up from the dream and you're right back in bed the next night.

11:02 You can't sleep again.

11:05 There might be something outside the window

11:07 in the shifting patterns that never disappear.

11:12 The world is run by computers.

11:15 The world is run by robots.

11:17 And sometimes they ask us if we're a robot just because

11:21 we're trying to log on and look at our own stuff.

11:24 Prove!

11:25 Prove!

11:27 prove you're not a robot.

11:30 Look at these curvy letters.

11:33 No robot could ever read these in Dead Letter Department,

11:37 a 2025 game by developer Mike Monroe.

11:40 You spend all your time doing a robot's job because a robot can't do it.

11:45 It's only disturbing if you insist on thinking like a human being.

11:50 Dead letter department follows you on the first

11:53 couple days of a job that actually exists,

11:55 filling in the information on letters that can't be read by an automated system.

12:00 In 2022, Tom Scott shot a video

12:02 in the last remaining remote encoding center in the US,

12:06 a brightly lit labyrinth of cubicles in Salt Lake City.

12:10 What dead Letter department proposes is what if

12:14 you were the only employee of this center?

12:17 And what if you had to work in Silent Hill?

12:21 This is what you do in the game.

12:23 You wake up each morning, leave the world's grimiest apartment,

12:27 walk down a hallway with impossibly bad vibes,

12:30 crossed into another building with somehow even worse vibes,

12:33 and sit down in the dark with a computer.

12:37 And then you type what you see on screen.

12:41 Jessica Richards, 9776 Lafayette Shoal, Rockfield, Wisconsin, five three, 022.

12:49 Jacquelyn Bayles, nine eight, zero seven Park Forest, tomato, Arkansas.

12:54 72358 once you sit down,

12:58 your entire method of interaction with the game changes.

13:01 Prior to this, as you've navigated your apartment and hallways.

13:04 The game has used the standard wasd and mouse controls,

13:08 but here at the computer you won't touch the mouse at all.

13:13 Every control you need is bound to the keyboard.

13:15 You can zoom in on a letter or flip it over to see the back.

13:18 You can pull up a list of possible

13:20 addresses to autocomplete when you've typed enough,

13:22 and you can submit the envelope all without taking either hand off the keyboard.

13:28 Despite the tremendously unpleasant environment,

13:30 it's more than possible to get into a groove

13:34 while typing out the highlighted text of each letter.

13:37 to our valued customer at 67632 Dawson Lake Road.

13:44 But the groove isn't the only reason dead letter department works.

13:48 The real secret to why it's so engaging is because within that dark room,

13:53 within that mind numbing task,

13:55 you get to indulge an impulse shared by humans and technology alike.

14:00 You get to stick your nose into other people's business.

14:04 Liz writes a postcard from Tokyo telling the recipient that she's

14:08 currently eating noodles served out of the back of a guy's car,

14:11 and they're incredible.

14:13 Tara writes a letter to her grandma and addresses

14:16 the envelope with nothing more than her house is blue.

14:19 Raymond writes a letter to Sarah and asks her on the envelope over and over.

14:23 Can you see it?

14:26 The storytelling mileage the game gets out of these envelopes is remarkable.

14:30 The handwriting, the graphic design.

14:32 If the envelope is torn or damp or marked She's been dead for five years.

14:37 Leave us alone.

14:38 You get through the screen,

14:40 through your incredibly basic controls, a snapshot into people's lives.

14:45 But just as you start to enjoy your little flashes of voyeurism,

14:48 the automated system,

14:49 the one that supposedly just gives you random letters to transcribe,

14:54 starts acting strangely.

14:57 Or maybe I should say, you start seeing patterns.

15:01 The first one of these that I noticed was when

15:03 I got two of the same names in a row.

15:06 Anselma Shook.

15:07 Two, three, five eight.

15:08 Pepin.

15:08 Worland, Wyoming, eight two, 401.

15:11 Immediately followed by Anselma Shook, two three, five eight.

15:15 Pepin.

15:15 Worland, Wyoming, eight two, 401.

15:18 At first I thought it was a mistake on my part.

15:21 Maybe I hadn't actually submitted the first one correctly,

15:24 and it was just repeating.

15:26 But then just a few letters later Anselma Shook, Question mark.

15:32 Then another one, then.

15:33 Anselma Shook went missing.

15:36 And more and more and half the goddamn letters are addressed to Anselma Shook,

15:39 and I eventually noticed that she lives in the same city,

15:42 even has the same zip code as my terrible little apartment.

15:48 Anselma Shook wasn't able to break free.

15:51 Two.

15:51 Three.

15:51 Five.

15:52 Eight Pepin.

15:52 Worland, Wyoming.

15:54 Eight two, 401.

15:57 There are other things, too.

15:59 Sometimes I flip over a letter and for a moment it's not the backside.

16:03 It's some kind of anatomy, a picture of a mouth or teeth or viscera.

16:08 And then I flip it back and the picture is gone.

16:11 There was once when an envelope had

16:13 no address and was instead labeled R Williams.

16:16 The first person killed by a robot.

16:19 There was one time when, instead of an envelope,

16:21 I had to type an entire postcard about

16:23 a man who dreamed that he slit his throat,

16:25 only to awake and find that he had actually done it.

16:29 On my first playthrough,

16:31 I flipped an envelope over and glimpsed through the thin

16:34 paper a letter with the phrase I'm going to kill you.

16:38 Scrawled in thick black ink.

16:41 I have never seen this envelope again

16:43 on any subsequent playthroughs of the game.

16:46 I'm starting to wonder if I imagined it.

16:49 I write a letter to my own mother at the end of a day of typing addresses,

16:52 and tell her, you don't have to die to become a ghost.

17:00 At the beginning of proximate,

17:02 as I read those first chat logs stored in the underwater complex,

17:06 I felt like I was uncovering the correspondence of ghosts.

17:11 These messages described the halls I was stumbling through.

17:14 They had lived in the rooms I was only beginning to memorize.

17:18 But as I kept playing,

17:19 poring over their recorded arguments and midnight confessions,

17:22 my relationship with them started to shift.

17:26 My world outside these chat logs barely existed.

17:29 Wall six meters.

17:30 Door three meters.

17:32 Airlock two meters.

17:34 Compared to the way the Sona visor made me view the world,

17:37 this was bright and colorful and stuffed with personality.

17:41 I felt myself diminish in comparison.

17:44 Here on these consoles.

17:46 Was the real I was the ghost haunting them.

17:51 The main characters of proximate, after I remove myself from the equation were

17:56 clearly Ells and Willow the bioengineer and the radiologist.

18:01 They're hooking up.

18:02 They haven't clarified- Well, they haven't had the.

18:05 What are we chat yet.

18:08 Eventually, Ells tries to have this conversation over text,

18:11 of course, and it goes catastrophically.

18:15 Do you want to be my girlfriend?

18:16 Like officially?

18:18 She asks, followed immediately by.

18:20 Hey, are you still awake?

18:21 And then, an apology and a retraction and a retreat Willow says no.

18:27 In far too many words.

18:29 Ells later tells another friend, also over text,

18:32 I said, I want to make you happy.

18:34 And she replied with, I don't think you can.

18:39 Ells as one does spirals.

18:42 What is it that is so f**king morally reprehensible about

18:45 me that she can s**k my d**k but not love me?

18:49 She is at this moment emotionally aligned with us in the Sona visor.

18:53 She's just seeing a list of obstacles and confidence percentages.

18:57 Hasn't she kept the whole borderline personality thing pretty in check?

19:01 Can Willow just see the crazy behind her eyes?

19:03 Is it the trans thing?

19:04 Does she have too many stretch marks?

19:06 Where is the goddamn door to this room?

19:10 I should probably mention that between these what are we conversations,

19:15 the thing they're doing down here is

19:17 figuring out how to reanimate corpses with AI.

19:20 With enough investment, their press release says,

19:23 this could pave the way for a new era in global commerce.

19:28 No one really knows the consequences of doing this.

19:31 They're just hoping the technology world will see the future for them.

19:37 There might be someone outside the window again.

19:40 There shouldn't be.

19:41 I know what's behind there.

19:42 I shouldn't need to get out of bed.

19:44 But there might be something outside the window.

19:48 So I get up and I open the blinds, and behind them is nothing.

19:53 No person, no waving branches.

19:55 Nothing except fog, fog and, The absence of something moves towards the window.

20:08 A break in the numbers.

20:09 A void I gasp in real life, frozen in place.

20:13 This is my actual real life worst fear,

20:17 drawn out of my psyche and placed on a screen within a screen.

20:22 It draws closer.

20:23 I do the only thing I can and shut the blinds,

20:26 closing myself off from that abyss.

20:27 I open them again, branches gently swaying.

20:32 No void.

20:34 I dream of the gas mask man again,

20:36 and he tells me there's something in a box outside.

20:39 I can already imagine all the false options, the intruding voice will give me,

20:43 how it will only end in one place with me outside.

20:48 Retrieving that box.

20:51 Inside the screen is a box.

20:53 Inside the box is a screen, a phone, my phone hidden away.

21:00 The intruding voice tells me that my phone serves

21:02 as a window to a world filled with violence and hypocrisy.

21:06 Then maybe I put the phone in the box for my own good.

21:09 But am I that intruding voice?

21:12 Is it me?

21:12 Did I decide to hide my phone?

21:14 Or did the voice?

21:17 Maybe its goal was to isolate me.

21:20 Is this world filled with anxiety

21:22 and voids and flame-licked dreams A better place?

21:27 I open up the phone and look through the pictures.

21:30 The cabin where I'm staying, Where I went to escape it all.

21:34 My friends, my dog.

21:37 And then the cabin again.

21:39 Somehow, chronologically, before all of this started.

21:43 It doesn't make sense.

21:44 I zoom in and there he is, the gas mask man.

21:47 A dream within a screen, within a screen, within a screen.

21:50 And then the battery goes dead.

21:52 And reality has been so thoroughly distorted through each

21:55 of these lenses that I have no idea what's real,

21:59 except for the patterns that move unceasingly through my field of view.

22:07 On my second playthrough of Dead Letter Department.

22:10 I realize there's a way to pierce the veil between the screen and my life.

22:15 What if I don't type in the proper address on the envelope?

22:18 What if I type in my address, the one on my lease in the terrible dim kitchen?

22:26 I try it out.

22:27 The next morning, a bushel of letters fall through the mail slot.

22:31 I can read the correspondence between the men

22:33 writing from PTAH road in an unnamed city.

22:37 I can struggle through whatever Raymond needed to tell Sarah so desperately.

22:42 I can direct Anselma Shook went missing to myself and read

22:46 the enclosed newspaper clipping about a body found in a bathtub.

22:51 Receiving these letters is deeply unnerving.

22:55 And not just because of their contents.

22:57 When a new envelope appears at my door,

22:59 I realize that everything I've seen is a real, tangible object,

23:04 that the distance I put between myself and their contents

23:07 is as thin as a single changed address.

23:12 More distressing, though, is the knowledge that in my first playthrough,

23:16 the idea of closing this distance never even occurred to me.

23:21 I typed everything exactly as it said.

23:24 No matter if I was sending a threat or a bomb or a message to a dead person.

23:29 I followed the instructions.

23:31 I did as I was told.

23:32 I relinquished my own sense of agency.

23:36 It wasn't freeing to discover I could send the letters somewhere else.

23:41 It was embarrassing how quick I had been to give up my own sense of self,

23:46 to see the world only as that software asked me to.

23:52 Horror has always been a cipher for our collective

23:56 anxieties and is often more easily identified in retrospect.

24:00 Slashers invade the drowsy suburbs.

24:02 We're invaded by some outside force or warped by an internal one class,

24:07 race, bodily autonomy.

24:10 It's an observation obvious enough to be banal, and these three games,

24:15 released within 12 months of each other could easily fit into the same category.

24:20 Computer horror.

24:21 What have we done to ourselves through technology?

24:24 Have we abandoned the real world?

24:27 But I think the distinction is a little more fine than that.

24:32 What I get for playing these games is the suppressed yearning for some thing,

24:38 some connection that we've intentionally

24:41 or inadvertently walled ourselves away from.

24:44 Our fundamental vision has been shifted by a visor or a pattern,

24:49 or a software, and thus the manifestations of our desired connections shift too.

24:55 In proximate, Our decontextualized perception of the environment

25:00 can't coalesce into an understandable world,

25:02 and the previous residents subtext- laden

25:05 messages fragment into those same disparate pieces.

25:09 I look and I'm told exactly what I'm seeing, but it still doesn't make sense.

25:14 Ells looks and she reads what Willow was saying,

25:16 and yet it still feels incomprehensible.

25:20 The tools I and they use to interface with the world

25:24 are creating an expectation of knowledge that they can't possibly satisfy.

25:29 In without a dawn, everything is too connected.

25:34 It's clear to us that there should

25:36 be boundaries between the different layers of existence,

25:38 but they've broken down,

25:40 folded into each other and maddeningly within all of them,

25:43 there exists the tease of a pattern,

25:46 a promise that all of this could make sense if we

25:49 just look closely enough and once we know that, of course,

25:53 there's no choice but to look.

25:55 The only thing worse than that writhing torrent

25:57 of numbers is when something stands outside of it.

26:00 Something even more unknowable.

26:03 The pattern has no answer for these apparitions, nor a way of avoiding them.

26:08 Eventually we will see our own blood and realize with relief, with horror,

26:13 that it too is free from the pattern And in dead letter department,

26:18 This exhaustion, this excruciating stint with a reality finds an answer.

26:23 This is all less complicated.

26:25 If we just submit to the software.

26:28 Yes, we will witness distressing things at an impossible rate.

26:31 We will see pain and yearning and anger and psychosis.

26:35 But if we simply slot them each into their pre-apportioned bin,

26:38 we can keep ourselves outside of them.

26:42 There's the world out there, and the one in here,

26:44 and the one in here isn't better.

26:46 It's almost certainly worse.

26:48 But maybe it's easier to deaden ourselves to it

26:51 all when it all comes through the same box.

26:54 Anselma Shook may never have come back,

26:56 but we know what address she's supposed to go

26:59 to, and caring beyond that will only slow us down.

27:03 The computer needs our help.

27:05 After all, it can't do any of this without us.

27:16 It's still me.

27:17 No beard, but it's still me.

27:20 Remember earlier I told you I was going to talk about my new book?

27:23 It's that time.

27:24 I'm going to talk about my new book.

27:26 What's it called?

27:28 You're not overthinking it.

27:30 What is it?

27:30 Ten of my favorite essays I've published on this channel,

27:33 alongside mountains of new writing by me and other authors.

27:37 When can you buy it?

27:39 Now!

27:40 Here's slightly more information, if you're not sold yet.

27:44 This is an annotated essay collection from me.

27:47 I return to pieces of mine like Fear

27:49 of Dark or The Men Who Couldn't Stop Crying,

27:51 or Games, Schools and Worlds designed for violence.

27:55 And I've added hundreds of new insights on how I originally wrote the essay,

27:59 or things I would change,

28:00 or how my thinking has shifted in the years since release.

28:04 That's cool.

28:05 That's neat, I think.

28:06 But what's even better is what other people have added to the book.

28:10 Each essay has an original afterword by a new author,

28:13 expanding on its themes in some novel and unexpected direction.

28:17 For instance, Remy Siu the creative director of A Thousand Times Resist,

28:20 has written an absolute home run follow

28:23 up to my essay Nothing Ever Stops Existing.

28:26 Lily Alexandre is doing a whole thing

28:28 on outsider music to follow art for no one.

28:31 The Shape of Infinity is getting a whole mini graphic novel.

28:36 The book is also huge and gorgeous and bursting with original art.

28:40 Just as an example, when I made Fear of Dark.

28:43 I borrowed a painting from artist Dragan Bibin for the thumbnail.

28:47 Now, for you’re not overthinking it.

28:49 I commissioned him to do an entire new piece of art and we'll just look at it.

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28:58 The book is available for preorder right

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29:02 And just during this period,

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29:09 which includes a beautiful box,

29:11 a custom slipcase, a seven inch vinyl with original music made for my essays,

29:16 an embroidered patch, a print of the cover, and some stickers.

29:19 Just for kicks.

29:21 The book is exactly the same in either version.

29:23 This is just for y'all who want all the extra goodies.

29:29 I'm so proud to be releasing this book and so

29:31 happy to be working with Lost in Cult again.

29:34 Secure your copy today.

29:36 The link to buy it is in the episode description.