A MILLION SCATTERED PIECES · EDITION 001 · WORKING LISTENING ROOM
Rigid grid. Soft bodies. Serious forecast. Absurd subject.
A Million Scattered Pieces is a publishing and research space for projects that move through more than one form — images, writing, sound, references, experiments, and work that is still becoming itself. A listening room belongs inside that structure because some projects need to be heard as well as read. It gives an edition one public shelf for the records, tracks, fragments, and sonic references surrounding the work without pretending they are a soundtrack or a set of instructions.
This first room introduces Chance of Katz, a falling-cat photographic collage game currently in development by Jay Muhlin, with sound by Derek Jerome. The game is being made as a playable visual experiment: cats fall through an exact grid while weather language — forecast, pressure, danger, heavy catfall — gives the system its straight-faced logic. The game-making is still in progress, and this room is part of that process rather than documentation of a finished object.
The first A Million Scattered Pieces edition can therefore introduce the project through several doors at once: the playable game, the writing around it, and the music being listened to while its visual and sonic language develops.
These are coordinates, not a blueprint.
The umbrella started with the name. Chance of Katz already sounds like a weather report — chance of rain, chance of snow, chance of something coming down. The umbrella just makes that visible.
It’s not meant to be a mascot or a cute cat logo. I’m thinking of it more like a weather-service symbol, an airport-display glyph, or some small piece of instrument-panel notation: simple, functional, almost official.
As the game developed, the weather language became part of the structure — forecast, pressure, danger, heavy catfall. The umbrella became the shorthand for all of that: a serious little symbol attached to a ridiculous event.
<aside> ☂️
THE UMBRELLA IS NOT PROTECTION. IT IS NOTATION.
A small sign that says: conditions are present.
</aside>
Derek's playtest note about the landing guide — that it prevents an off-by-one drop and functions as an accessibility advantage — opened a separate research path.
In falling-block games the guide is usually called a ghost piece or shadow. Arika's Tetris: The Grand Master uses the wonderfully bureaucratic name Temporary Landing System (T.L.S.) — and, more usefully for us, shows it only up to level 100. Past that point the game keeps the piece, keeps the grid, and takes the forecast away. Difficulty there is not only a matter of pieces moving faster. It is a matter of how much the player is still allowed to see.
That folds directly back into the weather language:
A forecast here isn't probability. It's access to the near future.
The engine knows where the piece is going. The design question is how much of that knowledge the player receives — landing position, next piece, perhaps later pieces beyond that. The ghost-piece research is a useful way of thinking about visibility, information, pressure, and preparation inside the weather system that was already there.
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The music came first as a prompt for listening together and starting a conversation with Derek about what Chance of Katz might sound and feel like. It isn’t a soundtrack assignment. These records are starting points — a way to talk about rhythm, atmosphere, repetition, memory, transmission, and the strange tone the game is beginning to find.