Newsletter 7, Apr 2026

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDROME. It is lovely to have you.

TERRORDROME DISPATCHES are sent out once a month, and are a great way to keep up with my unsettling noises.

(I’m also on Bluesky as @cyborgurl.)

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ANNA ANTHROPY PATCH NOTES: APRIL 2026

• Probably my biggest, newest news of the month: I just released Shareware Made Me Trans, a ~6000-word zine about the games I played on my family’s PC in the 90s and my own gender journey. A sort-of sequel to ZZT.

  

• The contract project I’ve been working on for the past several months has moved into QA testing. Hopefully, you’ll be able to play it soon! Apologies for being vague!

• We’ve finalized the design and layout of the bound edition of Princess with a Cursed Sword! You can check out a preview of the front and back covers as well as a typical page in this BackerKit post.

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THE PERILS OF THE ASCII DAMSEL

(CW: Dysphoria, fantasy captivity and torture.)

Despite the simplicity of ZZT's graphics and sound (beeps, whirrs and chirps, a PC's native language), the ZZT editor has a surprisingly robust scripting system, allowing for characters who recite dialogue on contact or even extended "cutscenes" like in a console game. It requires an amount of buy-in: if you tell your player a collection of scripted objects is a cutscene and they sit and watch until the end, that's as real as it gets. Given this, the possibilities for genre, subject, and theme in a ZZT game were beyond the simple key-collecting and enemy-shooting of the four official episodes.

As a pre-teen author undergoing the incorrect puberty, my own ZZT games circled the same themes again and again, at first with a layer of distancing irony that slowly eroded like the mountain being pecked away by that bird in Hell: they were fetish games. They revolved around captured princesses, with bare feet and torn dresses, chained in ASCII dungeons, punished and degraded, threatened with torture and hardship and peril. These were, in essence, all manifestations of the submissive woman, the painslut and pillow princess I would eventually become, but could not yet admit to wanting to be, could not yet admit that such a thing could be wanted.

"It was a terrible month... Chained here in this... this... DUNGEON! Being tortured every day... Being treated like a slave... Not being with you... Every morning, waking up in chains... Not being able to move... In these uncomfortable clothes... The pains in my hands and feet from the stone walls and floor... I could never thank you enough for rescuing me!"

This dialogue is from a damsel to her rescuer, her in-game fiancé and the player character. Though these games were about the damsel characters, the bulk of the game's text devoted to them and their trials, invariably the player would actually inhabit some male rescuer: an outside agent who would ruin the fun by freeing them from captivity. These men were handsome, strong, and utterly paper-thin — the same image I saw when I tried to imagine the adult man I would someday grow into, the man that would somehow happen to me.

— Continued in Shareware Made Me Trans

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WHAT HAVE I BEEN PLAYING CORNER: PERSONAL COMPUTING EDITION

I recently got SheepShaver, a Mac emulator, up and running on my PC, and I’ve been using it to explore games I missed and old favorites alike.

• Scarab of Ra. An all-timer: a dungeon crawler with no (direct) combat, and probably one of the strongest influences on the 3D maze game I’ve been slowly tinkering with.

• TaskMaker. I realized recently that I had played the sequel, but never the original. Has the elusive quality I call “ZZT-ness” — a tile-based world where any thing can be anything.

• Progress Quest. Okay, a Windows one. Before idle games became the Valhalla for aging games academics, Progress Quest (2002) was the first and only good one. A genuinely funny parody of both the conventions of games and of the Windows desktop. My Trans-Kobold Tickle-Mimic is Level 36.

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And that’s this month! From our terrordrome to yours: Stay soft, stay strong, stay nasty.