Interview Series (Installment #4) - Rudy Johnson a.k.a. lynchpoet

Electronic Blanket’s Interview Series (Installment #4): Rudy Johnson a.k.a. lynchpoet 

interviewed by Wolfgang Carnifex

Rudy Johnson, known as lynchpoet (and sometimes E.E. COLI, TempleOS Grandin, and Fetus Commander), is a game developer, writer, editor, and all-around fascinating character. He is one of the minds behind Misery Tourism and The Last Estate. 

Fig 1-0: The work of Rudy Johnson

(Blogger removed Rudy's original image for this interview so we've replaced it with a still of Chevy Chase & Sam Neill from John Carpenter's Memoirs of an Invisible Man)

WC: I know you as Rudy and lynchpoet, but you seem to have multiple handles. Do you use various names for different types of projects or what? I know you make games as well as write fiction/nonfiction. Please explain.

RJ: I mostly go by lynchpoet now, but I was E.E. COLI for a while. I’m still credited that way on some sites that deal with tabletop role-playing games. Many of the games I’ve made are on the Misery Tourism itch.io page. A lot of the fiction I write is child-soldier-themed fantasy shit. I’m pretty proud of “Pale Manipulator Music”, which is my totally retarded, totally gay take on songfic. I don’t know who wants to read a short vignette about children shooting their parents in a Schrödinger’s-Africa setting that’s also inspired by a Linda Lindas song, but now you can! The nonfiction stuff I do is autofiction (LOL). I love autofiction because I can just say things that aren’t true at all, or insert Marvel supervillains or talk about my dead dad, and nobody — not my English teacher, not my friends, not the momma - not even the gray ghost of Shelby Foote hisself - is going to wave their fucking saber about “accuracy” or “authenticity.” As far as the games I make, well, I hope you like chess variants? I mean that sincerely. I would earnestly like more people to like chess variants, like my completely unplayable-but-please-try “Heighliner Chess” Dune fan-game where you fold the board every move (hehe get it? folding space?). Chess is a fascination for me. Or you might call it a fixation. It’s one of the things I do when I should be cleaning my filthy house. I like designing games a lot more than writing or doing anything else really. Ask me about game design if you want an EverQuest-style trauma/lore-dump that takes as long to complete as an early-2000s-era EverQuest epic weapon. Start a conversation with me about Night in the Woods and depressive college cats. Start a fight with me on Twitter about the indie RPG “scene.”

                                              

                                                            Heighliner Chess (Rudy Johnson)

WC: I played a little chess in prison. There are some cold chess players in there. They have a lot of time on their hands. Who are some artists you’re vibing with right now? I mean for inspiration or just ones you enjoy. Music, film, writing? Anything really.

an unplayable chess game by Rudy Johnson

 

RJ: Whenever I want to make something, my rotation is Avril Lavigne >>> Ukraine war footage >>> League of Legends match where I get yelled at by my team for being a “faggot retard.” So, inspiration-wise, I guess I have to tip my hat to Avril, the artists formerly known as Azov Battalion, and Riot Games. I really love the stuff I see on Don't Submit! and Idiomenon's shit. Everything Jesse Hilson does makes me want to move creative gears, and many things he writes make me want to move to the Middle East and do Jihad or at least nondenominational love/hate bombing. Everyone everywhere should buy everything Jesse puts out, all at once, so we can make him a multi-versal millionaire and counter the Thanos *snap* with some kind of massive indie lit shockwave. Shout out to him and all shellshocked Misery Loves Company vets who regaled William, me, and the cold-internet-void with bursts of insane work. And here “insane” means anything you want it to and more, but has a good connotation. Speaking of voids, I think Katy and VoidSpace Zine are doing really important work that serves interactive media in a way that doesn’t really exist elsewhere. The work there is like Choose Your Own Adventure shit but stranger.

Jesse Hilson's substack

WC: I’m hip to Jesse’s work. We published his story "Volunteer" at Pixelated Shroud back when that was a thing.

RJ: Oh word? Yeah, while I'm doing this interview I'm listening to Necry Talkie, a band whose language I can't understand at all. I like them. Listening to foreign language music with good guitar work makes me feel illiterate in a good way.  

Necry Talkie

WC: I know people hate picking favorites, but what would you say your favorite novel is? Or one of your favorites. And it doesn’t have to be a novel, could be a nonfic book or collection, poetry, whatever.

RJ: Peter Watts’ Blindsight is my favorite novel. It says a lot of things about the value of consciousness (spoiler alert: it’s negative) that I mostly agree with and it’s nice to read that kind of nihilistic shit while I'm enjoying the weird sci-fi tapestry of Watts’ strange ‘tism-cosmos. It contains a hard sci-fi explanation of why vampires hate crucifixes too. So wonderful.  

Blindsight by Peter Watts (2006)

WC: Favorite album? 

RJ: Paul Simon’s Graceland. “Why am I soft in the middle, the rest of my life is so hard” is a line I internalized as a 12-year-old listening to this on my parents’ car’s tape-deck, and it’s still relevant to me today.

Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al" video

WC: “I want a shot at redemption, don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” Fuck yeah! I used that as an epigraph for an unfinished short story just a few months ago. So strange you mention that song. Anyway, favorite film?

RJ: Mary Poppins, hands down. That’s the children’s movie, the Walt Disney one. I won’t be explaining this, but watch this scene:

WC: With your work, what are you trying to convey, if anything? 

RJ: It’s an unpopular and probably ignorant opinion, but I think profundity and meaning are overrated in art. Most of my work has a purpose (either for me or for the hypothetical audience), but not a “thesis” if that makes sense. I would hope the work displays mental illness—mine and others—in a way that leads to alternating discomfort and wonder. The greatest compliment someone could give me would probably be saying something like: “Your work made me feel the way I felt while getting lost in the Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie after my favorite cat died.” But I don’t know if creating that feeling is, like, “meaningful” in any larger sense. The work is all latent discomfort mixed with autistic model-train euphoria mixed with dissociation. The work is the work.

The Hobbit (1977)

WC: I felt similarly about Bakshi's Wizards. Same year as Hobbit, incidentally. What are your thoughts on spirituality and on spiritual disciplines generally? Do you have any sort of faith in anything outside yourself? 

RJ: I have almost no thoughts about religion. I believe there’s probably some kind of God but have no faith because I think the religious center of my brain is broken. I tried to pray when I was little and felt stupid and embarrassed to the walls. I say “to the walls” because it’s hard for me to imagine that anything else was watching, but I dunno.  

lynchpoet's X account

WC: You and William are the force behind Misery Tourism. I understand you two are now doing The Last Estate? Care to elaborate on that? 

RJ: William started The Last Estate as a cool space for cultural critique, and it quickly took off. Really awesome shit came out of it including a Derek Maine piece about chess that I'm still jealous of and a bunch of others that tackled cultural/lit critique stuff. “Indie lit supergroup” doesn’t quite describe it, but it’s close and music is cool so whatever. Some of my favorite pieces (in no real order): Sabrina’s Holocaust-flavored interview, William’s own Rings of Power take-down, and that Derek chess-piece I mentioned. TLE is on a kind of infinite hiatus right now, but Gabriel Hart has sort of taken some of the concepts and ran with them in a print publication called Beyond the Last Estate (William and I contribute to a column there called “Misery Mailbag” and are having a lot of fun). The archive of The Last Estate is still fully functional, and I definitely would say check it out for the weird reviews of scene-adjacent art and other cultural lunacy.  

WC: I will have a look, for sure. What kind of porn do you watch? Any fetishes? 

RJ: I like feet. I find bushcraft videos of women digging wells while wearing sandals to be masturbation material. I’m not being ironic or shock-jocking, this is what I actually do.

hot XXX bushcrafter 

WC: Oh I believe you. That’s actually not that weird, but interesting. Lastly, since consumption is the Grand Design of this existence, we like to end interviews with the question: what are some of your favorite foods?

RJ: Pizza. McDonald’s chiKKKen nuggets. The McDouble. The McDonald’s triple cheeseburger. I’m garbage.

unidentifiable McDonald's item

Wolfgang Carnifex is the EIC of The Pixelated Shroud. He is a multimedia artist from Detroit.