While basking in the glory of their naturalistic digital home, a child mistakenly clips outside its boundaries, beginning a chain of events that ultimately lead to its erasure.

• This film was produced over the course of about 4 months, officially beginning in September of 2025 after solely existing in Conceptual Purgatory for god knows how long. Just depends on how you count it. The title, initial premise, and aesthetic presentation of MyRoad Away-Ahead formed in April of 2024, but I also ended up merging all of that with a separate digital horror film concept from January of 2023 titled "Breakery Bound", which is where the motif of clipping through walls & falling through voids comes from. This process of merging multiple smaller independently-formed concepts into one huge project is a big part of why my work is Like That.

• Mere weeks after filming the "Swing of Flee" section, the ROBLOX game "experience" it took place in was made completely inaccessible, as part of an asinine decision to permanently close down any "experiences" which had not been given a specific maturity rating, thereby implicating anything with an inactive creator (save for some special manual exemptions), effectively erasing god knows how many millions of precious artifacts, including plenty of my own childhood favorites, such as the Swing of Flee itself (a place my 2011 girlfriend introduced me to), which I am grateful to have paid tribute to here, unknowingly for the very last time. It's a historic data loss right up there with the likes of MySpace's 2019 server transfer catastrophe, except rather than being an accident, it was a matter of willful obtuseness, totally immune to the desperate pleas of an entire community. Nothing was stopping them from simply restricting unrated games to 18+ users only; Safety™ and Preservation are not mutually exclusive. Numerous people pointed this out beforehand, and ROBLOX did not give a shit. Genuinely fucking evil company. I recognize that even this is pretty low on the list of their crimes against the world, but still. I am forever in awe at what The Silly Block Game I Grew Up On has morphed into. How fitting that one of the sets in a movie about enshittification would fall victim to enshittification during production. The metatext writes itself.

(ADDENDUM: oops. apparently the Swing's creator wasn't as inactive as i thought. the Swing has successfully been assigned a maturity rating and reopened for business. now my metatext is ruined. BUT STILL, the fact that this happened during production at all is remarkable, even if temporarily.)

• Okay, here's a bit of behind-the-scenes metatext that no one can take away from me: throughout the final couple months of production, I found myself in the heat of psychological warfare with Windows Update, doing everything in its power to trick me into installing Windows 11, disguising a complete change of OS as merely an ~Important Update~. I changed every conceivable setting relating to this function, buried within the darkest depths of regedit.exe & gpedit.msc, and not one of them could put a permanent end to this godforsaken screen-covering popup forcing me to click "Wait an hour" 15 times a day. And it just kept getting worse. Literally as I began writing this fact, my computer forcefully restarted with no warning, despite my best efforts. I caught a brief glimpse of a "Cancel" button, a carrot dangled in front of my face, frantically clicked, and watched in horror as it did fuckall. I wish I was making this up. I'm just lucky that particular restart somehow didn't install the actual "update"; it was merely preparation.

After a hard-fought battle, what finally ended up working for me was a little batch script on Github by the name of GoodByeWindowsUpdate. So it seems I am free of Satya Nadella's autonomous gangstalking for the time being. I can only go on like this for so long, though. If Windows 12 also sucks so much that I refuse to install it, then I'm fucked. And by "fucked", I mean "will probably have to install Linux despite the multitude of art-threatening software compatibility issues that will surely result in". I'm way too easily frustrated by technical difficulties to endure that shit with my sanity left intact. But oh well!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• The only backing track entirely produced with this film in mind was the ambient drone heard during the "Swing of Flee" scene, which blatantly samples Celer. Unless you count the newly-extended version of a RINGEX PLASTER track beginning at the 41:31 mark. Bit of an edge case there. All other music (besides one corporate stock track) was pre-existing RJR material as usual, simply stripped of its original context. Although at least one of those pre-existing tracks is yet-to-be-released-at-the-time-of-writing, so it might as well be a new production as far as you're concerned.

• The first 14 minutes and 9 seconds of this film were edited in VEGAS Pro, at which point I finally gave up on trying to deal with these increasingly complex projects using that broken-ass spaghetti code-riddled abandonware masquerading as a flagship product. For years I had been stockholm syndrome'd into assuming there was no better option for me, that I was better off sticking with the crash-happy devil I knew than painstakingly learning the ultra-difficult devil I didn't, but to my pleasant surprise, the learning curve of Davinci Resolve ended up being remarkably smooth, and within a couple weeks or so, it was as if this had been my sole editor of choice all along. So if anyone reading this happens to be in the same position I once was: please know that it doesn't have to be like this. You don't actually have to settle for a 50% chance of a 10+-second freeze every single time you press Ctrl + Z. You don't have to settle for upwards of a dozen crashes in a singular editing session. You don't have to settle for astronomical render times & piss-poor playback rate persisting regardless of how high-end your hardware is. I know the familiar interface & workflow are tempting to stay with, but you must make the jump before it's too late. A better world is possible.

(Expect more of this strange hybrid editor approach in at least a few more films I have in the works; unfortunately, many of them Also began as VEGAS projects.)

• The SystemSeller's "Click the app that..." spiel was based on an actual survey I overheard my mom taking. Something about that one in particular really gave me the ick.

• The name Seraphina Aldridge was arbitrarily chosen from a list of randomly-generated executive names, courtesy of this webpage. I thought it'd be fitting for the name of a CEO character to have as little heart put into it as possible.

• The "Bottom Line" graphic is also used in the cover art of a yet-to-be-released-at-the-time-of-writing Her Wonderworld Reversal Orchestra album.

• The out-of-bounds house exploration scene was based on a very specific idea I had for a horror game back in February of 2024.

— 2/29/2024
for a stealth horror chase type element in a game, replace the usual Crazy Loud Jumpscare When Getting Caught with just a hard cut to silence and a static image, before another hard cut back to normal gameplay at a checkpoint. could also have some slight randomization in how exactly the static image looks to avoid total loss of impact. i find this unnerving in its own way // the particular mental image i had in mind for this concept was modeling the kitchen in my house at night, and dad being the thing to avoid, and he'd have these intentionally choppy animations. when you get caught, it locks you in place and darkens your surroundings, and he just slowly slides towards you leading up to the image cut

I think it's best for me to just go ahead and use game-related ideas in movies for now, because I have no fucking clue when I'll actually be ready to take on game development. That's like, the final boss of artistic mediums. It'll simultaneously require all of my existing skills and then some. (Which makes it all the more baffling that video games' classification as "art" is/was such a point of contention...) Plus, fake video games are such a one-of-a-kind vehicle for storytelling anyway, so I'm happy to continue taking part in that.

• The pink/purple cursor set seen in various screen recording segments is the same cursor set I actually use on my personal computer outside of this film, and have been for at least a few years at this point.

• The phrase "lil' billy bedwetter bill" quotes the cs188 YTP "PRESIDENTIAL ELIMINATION DAY".

• Rose's profile picture is taken from an unused version of the rosereplacer profile picture, with pink hair instead of red hair. This doesn't mean I necessarily intended for them to canonically be the same person, though; I thought of it as a Reference at most. But I guess they theoretically could be? Unless some explicit contradiction emerges.

• All photos & videos seen in the "Your Memories" segments come from my real-life childhood.

I love that last clip in the "Your editorialized reactions" part where little pre-trans me is making the same sort of exaggerated manic expression seen in the cover of XPERIENCE Everything. Some things never change.

• Partly a fun fact, partly a disclaimer: the layers of abstract visuals in the scene beginning at 55:39 & ending at 57:41 come from a recording I took using the Minecraft mod "Oasis", which mangles the game environment in real time using a video-to-video diffusion model, resulting in the specific kind of dreamy uncanniness that """AI""" images were once defined by, up until all their most fascinating imperfections were systematically stamped out in favor of the dull hyperrealism we recognize today. So now you know. I do not seek to deceive you, and as usual, my limited use of this technology was with symbolic intent, in this case representing the opacity of corporate computer science, a real-life black box playing the role of a fictional black box, reimagined as an eldritch beast beyond rational explanation, emphasizing the incomprehensibility of its output. Now comes the part where you go tell everyone on social media that ROXY RADCLYFFE JUST ADMITTED TO AI GENERATING THE ENTIRETY OF HER LAST MOVIE and get 18 quintillion likes for your worldview-affirming misinformation.

• The blood in the sink is real.

• Some footage used during the climax and its preceding buildup was taken during an actual power outage at my girlfriend's house, and those recordings were how I passed the time.

In general, I'd estimate about half of this film resulted from the principle 'shoot now, make sense of it later'. There is indeed a linear sequence of events taking place here; it just took time to fully reveal itself to me, and I'm not interested in precisely spelling it out. I've only explicitly outlined the plot's gritty details to my girlfriend, who described it as sounding like a dream I had. So even in fully-explained form, it apparently evades understanding. That means I'm doing something right.

• The "bundle of sticks" (roots) seen being transported via wagon during the finale came from actual yardwork my mom asked me to help her with, which I suddenly realized the potential meaning of and brought my camera accordingly, just in time for that part to be edited.

• The small bright spots coating the final shots of 1080peak are supposed to be flickering rapidly rather than slowly morphing, but for whatever reason that effect didn't survive the final render, and I did not deem this a big enough issue to try re-exporting the entire thing for another chance. It's pretty either way. Whatever. Roll with the mishaps.

• I only just noticed that — in addition to the multiple other things I initially forgot to write in the credits sequence (which I thankfully caught before exporting) — I also forgot to credit myself for editing. What the fuck. That's the most important part!!! This wouldn't exist if I couldn't edit!!!