John's Newsletter of Nerdery #26
A possibly weekly email about what's been going on in my brain
14 - 21 May 2023
From around Newmillerdam
Definitely a better week than the last one, and in retrospect last week wasn't that bad. It was a rude re-introduction to the banality of life away from travelling; I had to sit down and concentrate rather than wander waif-like from sight to sight. And people wanted things from me, what a notion. Add to that having to perform such herculean tasks as "making my own bed" and "cooking for myself" and at the weekend I wanted to do very little.
Thankfully The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released last Friday (12th May) which has been an absolute joy to play. Basically everything I enjoyed about its predecessor Breath of the Wild has been improved upon, but the core pleasure of existing within the open world Hyrule is still the biggest draw for me. Compared to other open world games (Grand Theft Auto, most Ubisoft fare) where just existing is either a chore or almost actively discouraged.
I also saw some friends and walked around Newmillerdam, followed by experiencing the technicolour slap to the face that is Eurovision, then later in the week took delivery of a new computer, a new blind and set of curtains for my cinema room, and squeezed in dinner out with some of my favourite people in the world. A resolutely better week.
But some of those are a topic for another time, because what I really wanted to write about is something I touched upon a couple of weeks ago in the "Links and things" section.
Liminal spaces
The original backrooms image from KnowYourMeme
The seed of this train of thought started when I read a Kotaku article on a video series by a chap called Kane Parsons. The video series is great, largely by how restrained it is, never explaining too much or defaulting to standard horror tropes. Can it even be called horror when it's not scary or gorey?
Watching the playlist inevitably led me back to SCP, initially with the Confinement fan animated series, but through the greasy magic of the YouTube algorithm also to various other SCP fan projects. The most notable a couple of very handsome looking live-action shorts: Dollhouse and Overlord, both by Evan Royalty. They also created some other SCP adjacent short films First Contact and Ghost Town, however those mask the somewhat rudimentary CG imagery with obnoxious camera filters (though I guess I can't be too snooty as Parsons also does this with a VCR effect).
Overlord's core conceit (spoiler if you haven't watched it) is people, and eventually an enormous creature, who are invisible without a special MacGuffin camera. When you take away the clunky dialogue and airsoft military fantasy, it boils down to a fear of the unseen, and one that is almost identical to my first true "kept up at night" scare courtesy of Are You Afraid of the Dark's sixth episode of season one where a pair of "magic" spectacles lets the wearer see faceless figures not otherwise visible. That idea terrified ten year old me, though its potency has waned in intervening coughalmostthirtycough years.
That's really the SCP wiki's bread and butter though and likely a large part of the reason for the collaborative fiction's popularity and longevity. It trafficks in the idea that the most innocuous of items could be horrifying or that there are multiple unkillable predators that operate on alien logic: ones that are immobile when viewed but frighteningly fast when not, or one that just by seeing its face is enough for it to want to murder you. The SCP wiki did spawn one of the most original sci-fi books I've read: There Is No Antimemetics Divison which posits organisms, structures and events that slip from the mind if not present and how that could affect a person, a relationship, or the entire world. It's a breezy, thought provoking read, even if you don't know (or don't particularly care for) the SCP idea.
The second video though, Dollhouse, is to me the more interesting and the fundamentally scarier one. Again there's that paramilitary wankery and (spoilers again) nonsense talk of being within a computer program, but the real meat for me starts with the utterly plain suburban house. There's the non-Euclidian space (always cool, even if the flavour here is a bit Narnia) but the weird, distorted inhabitants are the stars, calm and ordinary but disturbingly altered. And that's the horror: when the mundane is perverted. It reminds me of Silent Hill 4's apartment which at the beginning of the game has trapped protaginst Henry but offers an escape in the form of a hole in his bathroom (and after Covid's lockdowns, who wouldn't dive head first into a mysterious portal in your own home?), but as the game progresses the apartment becomes less safe, haunted, and eventually malevolent. That idea that the normal is now malignantly Other made the first Paranormal Activity film so compelling for me but also, finally, leads back to the Backrooms and Parsons.
The backrooms are unsettling because of their mundanity, they are not some blasted hellscape or abandoned mental hospital, just carpet and wallpaper that are then corrupted by the (idea of that) vast space. A locational equivalent of a Möbius strip or an impossible object. Being there might feel like a huge discovery, like being the first to find a hidden area in a videogame, but you fundamentally shouldn't be there. Parsons explores this idea in his (at the time of writing) most recent video The Oldest View - Beneath The Earth. Nothing much really happens in the twelve minute runtime, but the unreallness of a stairs descending deep into the earth (shout out to Silent Hill 2's Historical Society and SCP-087) and just ending up at a mall is enough to prickle the hairs on the back of your neck, the unseen cameraman even breathlessly says he shouldn't be there.
A liminal space then? The idea is laboriously explored in a YouTube video by Solar Sands (I recommend watching at 1.5x or even 2x speed to breeze through a lot of the cruft) who starts with the backrooms image and, amongst other ideas, posits that places like schools, offices, and malls become other when stripped of their context, i.e. when abandoned by people.
As the original Kotaku article pointed out, despite Parsons' young age, he's been brought on to direct a movie adaptation of the backrooms. It will be difficult to adapt, while there is a narrative thread throughout the YouTube series of a kind of colonisation of the space by a mysterious company, is that enough to sustain the narrative for a feature length film? Would doing so rob the idea of its allure? Fear after all lives in the imagined spaces between what's observed.
Paraphernalia
- Simone Giertz makes a robot arm out of stained glass
- Overwatch 2 drops planned PvE mode - I was massively into the original Overwatch for almost a year after release before bouncing off it, PvE was the only thing that piqued my interest in the sequel; does sound like Blizzard is hemorrhaging staff at the moment so this "cancellation" isn't surprising
- Cult Deprogrammer Breaks Down Cults In Movies and TV - I've had an interest in the psychology behind cults since I researched them for a long abandoned fiction book I was writing so this is a fascinating look from someone on the other side of them
- History of Japan - not a new video but if you haven't seen it you absolutely should, it's also entirely factually accurate
- Dune Part 2 trailer - heck yeah
- Baseline: a "unified" view of stable web features - Mozilla, Apple, Google and the W3C have collaborated on a list of modern web features that developers can treat as "generally available"; not sure how this differs from standard feature detection or project planning but it's nice everyone is getting along I guess?
This was hand-crafted by John.