YOUR HOUSE Trivia – Part 1

Your House is packed with things we love — small details, big references, and plenty of cultural nods, some obvious, others hidden away in drawers and dialogue.

This is the first in a two-part deep dive into the trivia behind the game: where certain objects come from, why that song is playing, or how a misheard lyric turned into a puzzle mechanic.

We couldn’t fit all the fun into one post, so stay tuned for Part 2. But for now, here’s a closer look at some of the secrets hiding just beneath the surface.

"Save Ferris"

You probably caught this one — “Save Ferris” shows up early in Your House, and before that, it already snuck into unmemory. We grew up with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off playing on VHS (and later DVD, and then probably streaming). It’s the kind of movie that hits different when you’re 14 and feel like the world’s already telling you who to be. That line still makes us feel like teenagers skipping school. Carefree, invincible, maybe a little too clever for our own good.

👉 Further Reading: Ferris Bueller's Day Off - Wikipedia

The Postcard Address

That address on the postcard? It’s real. We actually lived there for a year during a school exchange program. Not in Hicksville, of course — that’s our invented town — but somewhere that left a mark. We won’t say where exactly (some secrets are meant to be kept), but slipping that address into the game felt like hiding a tiny piece of our own story in Debbie’s. A kind of time capsule in plain sight.

Ladies Who Lust FM

This is a bit of a cheat. The Ladies Who Lust FM t-shirt technically shouldn’t exist yet in the timeline. In the story, the radio show comes much later — when Debbie and Diane are at college. But we couldn’t help ourselves. It was such a vivid idea: two friends with a mic, spinning tracks and telling messy, hilarious sex stories without filters. We always pictured it as half college radio, half midnight confessional. We wanted it to feel like a station you'd stumble across at 2 a.m. and never forget.

Billy Tipton and the Life Lived in Disguise

Billy Tipton’s story stayed with us the moment we heard it. A gifted jazz musician, born Dorothy Lucille, who lived as a man in order to do the one thing he loved most — play. His life was a patchwork of brilliance, resilience, and quiet heartbreak. That tension — between who the world sees and who we really are — became a blueprint for Serena Pulin, the architect in Your House. Like Billy, Serena hides more than her name. She reshapes herself to survive in a field built for men, bending expectations just to keep building. Not just houses, but a version of herself the world might finally take seriously.

👉 More on Billy Tipton

Muffuletta

The muffuletta recipe you find in the scrapbook is another personal insert. It’s Debbie’s favorite — and ours too. One summer, we stayed with a family friend in Karlsruhe who made the most chaotic, incredible version of this New Orleans classic. We couldn’t stop eating it. It’s not just about taste — it’s about memory. About discovering something new in a place that felt foreign. That’s what we wanted for Debbie too.

👉 Classic Muffuletta recipe

Hi-Fi /Debaser

We’ve told this story before, but it still makes us laugh. When we first heard “Debaser” by Pixies, we didn’t speak much English. So we assumed “Debaser” was some kind of futuristic machine — like a laser or a mind-melter. Later on, we kept the name and turned it into a series of puzzle boxes in unmemory. And in Your House, we doubled down: Debbie finds a Hi-Fi system with the brand “Debaser” on it. That’s where the idea comes from — a misheard lyric becoming a whole design choice.

👉 Debaser – The Pixies

View-Master

We’ve always had a soft spot for retro tech — the kind that made you feel like the future was already here, even if it squeaked or clicked. In unmemory, we squeezed in a Dymo label maker, a Walkman, a hulking slide projector... but never quite found space for a View-Master. You know the one — the little red binocular toy that let you flip through glowing reels of Rome, Barcelona, or wherever you wanted to be. We couldn’t stop thinking about it. So with Your House, we made a promise to ourselves: the View-Master goes in.

And when we finally added it, it didn’t just show random cities. Instead, we loaded it with the landmarks of our own invented town — Hicksville. Only these weren’t just places. They were memories, disguised as architecture:

• Moe’s Tavern, where Homer Simpson drinks and we learned what sarcasm really meant

• Fawlty Towers Hotel, still the funniest show about failure, misunderstandings, and British accents

• Apollo Theatre, our nod to Harlem’s soul-soaked stage

• Championship Vinyl, the heartbreak-and-records haven from High Fidelity

• The Daily Planet, doesn’t need much explanation, does it?

We named them not just because we could — but because naming is personal. These weren’t just references. They were ours. Frozen in little slides, waiting to be rediscovered through a plastic lens.

Why Hicksville?

When we started writing Your House, we needed a place. Not just a backdrop, but a setting with roots — and shadows. A town where memory could twist into myth, and the past could be hiding just behind the next door.

We thought about using a real location. There’s something grounding about real maps, real streets. But in the end, we chose fiction. Hicksville. A name we borrowed from one of our favorite graphic novels: Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks.

In Horrocks’s version, Hicksville is a small town on the coast of New Zealand where comics are treated like sacred texts, and where the secret history of the medium is buried — literally. It’s a love letter to forgotten stories, and a meditation on who gets to tell them. There’s beauty in its quiet streets, but also a tension: how we create art, how we hurt each other doing it, and how we try — sometimes clumsily — to make amends.

We didn’t try to replicate that plot, but the spirit of it stayed with us. We wanted our Hicksville to be a place like that — not just a location, but a container. For old feelings. For unfinished business. For the kind of secrets that only a house, or a town, can hold. Horrocks built a town for lost comics. We built one for lost people.

👉 Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks – Goodreads