I told Liz Ryerson I’d try to get a Let’s Play together for her videogame Problem Attic (a videogame you can read about and play for free on her website) way back in January of 2014. I needed to take care of a few things first, however. Most pressingly I needed a reasonable microphone, which was simple enough to acquire. But secondly I wanted to try correcting the frontal lisp that has embarrassed me since childhood. A frontal lisp happens when your tongue sticks through your teeth as you pronounce an English ‘S’; the word ‘spin’ becomes ‘thpin’, for example, or the name ‘Liz Ryerson’ becomes ‘Lith Ryerthon’. This was unacceptable.
One day last August I resolved to go cold turkey; I would simply refuse to allow my tongue through my teeth unless performing the English ‘th’ (a sound present in few other languages, perhaps because of how utterly bizarre it sounds and how badly it links with other consonants). The first week or two my tongue would slam into my gums every time I tried to talk; the ensuing months gave me jaw cramps from clenching it all day long. By the time I recorded voiceover for this video I’d gotten a passable handle on my new way of speech; when I listen back to the recordings, however, I cringe at every single bad ‘S’ (of which there are many). Having read these two paragraphs, dear viewer, you now get to do the same!
What follows is a Let’s Play of Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic from beginning to end, with voiceover recorded after the playthrough. I made it exactly one year after publishing Fashion, Emptiness and Problem Attic on this very website; my perspective on the game has changed quite a bit since then, but I’m still fairly happy with my work.