The blogs I was enamoured with as a kid – which parasitically shaped my brain, ensuring that I’d become even more enamoured with them as an adult – always treated Halloween like a Huge Fucking Deal. Sites like Bogleech and Dinosaur Dracula approached the season with a fervor usually reserved for religious occasions, spinning up article after article about demonical entities or the scariest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adversaries or the fucking Ghoulies and Critters. It is their fault that I will be thinking about these things on my deathbed.
I’ve always wanted to follow their example, and in an ideal world, this would be a month wherein WITH ENTRAILS goes totally apeshit: spooky article after spooky article, covering everything from Forbidden Siren to Skinamarink to the mysterious 15th century sweating sickness that killed victims mere hours after they began to show symptoms. Unfortunately, as you’ve likely realized, we don’t live in an ideal world. I’m chronically addicted to not starving to death, which occupies a decent chunk of my time. For this and other, secret reasons, October here will probably be a fairly reduced celebration of the season – like one of those depressing parking lot Halloween events where supervised children gather accretions of candy safe from razors and loaded guns.
Additionally, while it’s wonderful that my favourite genre of everything is one of the few with its own dedicated celebratory period, it’s hard to get wildly stoked about it when you’ve been surrounded by horror during the other eleven months of the year. It doesn’t seem to affect other devotees – maybe I’m just a fake and a poser, I dunno. That said, I had a bunch of aspirations for the month that are materializing, which you’ll see below among messy notes and scattered updates. Starting with…
CHIAROSCURO IMAGO
Hey! When last we spoke, I said our videogame was coming out in September. This ended up not happening for a confluence of reasons chiefly summed up by “shit happens”. Unfortunately, when something basically-done-but-with-a-small-list-of-remaining-tasks gets derailed, it can be hard to convince your brain that there’s even remaining work to be done in the first place. There is, by the way, but not a lot! There’s very little content missing, which makes a lot of the remaining tasks either clerical or wholly presentational – things like deciding on the length of dialogue pauses or replacing sounds we can’t legally use with sounds we legally can.
The game is essentially 90% done, and having played it through, I think it’s pretty incredible. Given the season, it’d be a crying shame if it didn’t come out by Halloween, so I reckon that’s the deadline. Then we can talk about it! Won’t that be exciting?
I’m out of vague, hinty things to hype it up with that don’t just give it away, hence the image for this section being reused from a previous article. These are the tribulations of making a horror game. If I was doing this on the site formerly known as Twitter, I’d have to constantly post tweets like “Visit the Bugonia diner for a lovely meal… But what if there was a Scary Guy? #chiaroscuroimago #screenshotsaturday”
WITH ENTRAILS (YOU ARE HERE)
Today’s “Fuck! There’s no visual aid for this!” aid is brought to you by Rain World.
The blog took a bit of a backseat between an emerging fiction project and a general period of disinterest in writing about games, which is tragically the easiest subject for me to write about (hence why this isn’t a blog About Games despite thus far being Mostly About Games).
It’s easy to look at the current state of videogames as cultural objects and find yourself overcome by a state composed of equal parts anger, dread, and pure apathy. Proper noun Gamers have never been a lesser species of cockroach than the kind encountered today: bigoted, puerile, and outwardly ridiculous; annoying and mildly dangerous in equal measure. On sum, necessary to ignore as much as possible, which is easier said than done. It’s an increasingly difficult measure to perform in part because of their incessant yelling and in part because encountering necessary mockery of the shitty little residue they leave behind is, by extension, coming into contact with a radioactive piece of their refuse.
It doesn’t help when they’re all fighting over a culture industry where the average AAA release is considered a subversive work if it isn’t an utter waste of time. The bar is pretty low seemingly everywhere, whether “the bar” is a matter of art, curiosity, or learning to stop being 12 years old. An interest in videogames usually comes with a growing interest in any sensible person to become a digital hermit. Still! Fighting the fight.
Currently, I have a few articles I’m hoping to write. Foremost, I have more to say about Morrowind. The next article in that series is mostly done, though it’ll need some heavy work before I consider posting it. I’d anticipate it coming out no sooner than sometime in November. That leaves me time to consider a few other topics, namely of the seasonal variety: horror games, horror scenarios, horror… fiction?
I’ve been writing for a long time, but I rarely publish stories; I stopped writing them for a number of years, which happened for no real reason beyond having little impulse to write down the little things I was constantly inventing, editing, and truncating in my head. But a few months ago, something took root and wouldn’t stop haunting my thoughts, prowling like a dog whenever I was bored or elsewhere committed: a strange, gooey, jellyfishy thing washing up on a shimmering beach; a Welles-y hermit presiding with distant humor over a backwater patch of civilization; a terrible presence called Carka-Ri-Mor, or the Carcass King, whose house bled naught but dead thoughts and empty rooms.
Suddenly, I realized that I wanted to write this story more than almost anything else… and that I couldn’t. An artist is lucky to produce even 90% of the result they see in their head, but this was grim. My skills were rustier than I could stand even by messy, churning first draft standards. I hadn’t attempted to write a piece of longform fiction since I was sixteen years old, and it showed: I had no serious outlining skills, no way to discipline myself, and no way to approach the thought of writing a book without breaking off into twelve disparate directions. I had ideas but only loosely competent prose, and even as I saw exactly what I wanted to write, there was a serious gap between what I could see and what I could produce.
But for the first time in years, I had a reason to improve. I was pushed to become a better writer not to reach a nebulous state of satisfaction, but to write something. To do that, I’ll need to work myself up to it, which is sufficient motivation to start writing short stories! I’m working on something right now, though it’s only “fiction” in the academic sense – a take on one of those clerical SCP-ish texts, albeit with most of the frills removed. It’s easy to tinker away with between everything else, so hopefully it’ll be a good exercise. If all goes well, I’ll post it sometime this month.
Beyond that, I’m hoping to do some work on the actual site before the end of the year. I’d like some pages for the navigation bar. Ideally fun stuff, e.g. a blogroll or some other things, like a list of recommended reading or a corpus of general media curios that isn’t cloistered in a specific post. Not sure! I think I’m basically happy with the base look and feel of things, so all that’s really left is to add buttons pointing to treasures and assorted mysteries. It’ll be like the original Cloverfield ARG, or the one they did for BioShock 2. (Despite claims to the contrary, anthropological misidentification included, ARGs went culturally extinct in 2016. Their present form is akin to a stuffed dodo.)
In the weird day-long gap between writing this section of the update and publishing it, I started the Silent Hill 2 remake, which is aggressively okay. Debating pursuing an article about it as my big games one for the month? I dunno! I was banking on not even playing it, watching as media outlets wrote about how average it was so I wouldn’t have to. Unfortunately, everyone published great reviews about it in an effort to trick me and waste my time. I’ve started and stopped like seven separate Silent Hill articles over the years, so maybe my spiel on why those games work so well will finally see the light of day… ?
MOVING, CAVORTING PICTURES
The current list of watched films for October. No, I hadn’t seen Return of the Jedi. I wanted to maintain any remaining separation from the ubiquitous cultural hegemony of Star Wars, but you pick up the entire movie through cultural osmosis anyway. Good time! Saturday morning cartoon energy proliferated by a manic, Amazing Stories approach to subcreation. Probably the only film I’ve ever seen that operates as a backdoor pilot, though I don’t think Ewokmania had much of a shelf life; they’re like if a pulp sci-fi writer was tasked with inventing the Minions.
Really, it makes you mad that we let this shit get out of hand. I can take or leave the Star Wars prequels, since they’re ultimately the product of a human artist trying things with dubious success. Unfortunately, everything else Star Wars in the 21st century is a nightmare from which millions find themselves unable to wake. Disney is the false dreamer, etc. Kill them not to appease the fans, but to end the hellish frog-march that drives us all closer to cacotopia.
Beyond that, I’ve been watching a lot of short films: acclaimed YouTube horror stuff I had never gotten around to, ancient BBC specials, the works. Loved A Warning to the Curious, which is filled with haunting, grim little vistas on the shores between life and something that isn’t quite death. M.R. James always provides the ideal template for a ghost story: portentous, fey, and chilly.
Between stuff like this and Penda’s Fen, I’m starting to wonder if the traditional British pagan-esque ghost yarn experienced a short-lived 70s revival. Perhaps the Beatles breaking up at the beginning of the decade unleashed some manner ghastly visitant upon the population, or maybe someone just dug something up when they weren’t supposed to. They’ve been doing it for centuries, and I speak for us all when I say we’re getting sick of it.
Ponyo was very scary.
GAMES? FUCK!
I thought the recent Lorn’s Lure was excellent – until about halfway through when it switches gears and becomes a twitchy, floaty platformer that sheds atmosphere like a crashing plane. Sometimes, them’s the breaks, but what’s good here is really good. I reckon the game is worth playing for those first five levels alone. The third area, which made me more uncomfortable than almost anything else I’ve played this year, is a brilliant subversion you can only appreciate with proper context.
I’ve played too many games to write about them all here! Having opinions is easy, but sharing them is exhausting. I don’t know how people do it, though it probably doesn’t help when you play a lot of really short things and end up wanting to write about all of them (hey, check out Mouthwashing).
I might try a lighter type of journaling for the things I’ll probably never get around to properly writing about – sorry LocoRoco, you deserve better.
(An elaborate ruse to dodge time otherwise spent flipping out over how reprehensible BioShock Infinite was. I have nothing new to say and yet I can’t stop thinking: why? The answers are unsurprising and yet utterly disturbring. Ken Levine is a terrifying portrait of a man whose brain can be said to work without actually producing anything coherent. A failed thinker and a bozo who couldn’t even produce a good Halo clone. Not hard, Ken!!)
If you scrolled down here specifically to learn what the thumbnail was from, it’s a custom mission for Thief II titled A Better Tomorrow. As with any custom Thief mission, I was quite taken by it. Properly scary!
THE SHELF? NOT SURE. I SHOULD REALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT I’M CALLING THESE SECTIONS BECAUSE I HAVE TO FRESHLY MAKE THEM UP EVERY TIME AND IT’S A LOT OF WORK
A great piece by Les Edwards for an illustrated edition of the book that I probably can’t afford.
My main focus is currently China Miéville’s The Scar, second in a trilogy of weird fantasy novels about a world filled with new things to imagine. I adored Perdido Street Station and this one feels even tighter, inspired by a love of oceanology, sociology, and horrible little sea monsters. While I can comprehend the criticism aimed at Miéville’s extravagant prose, the density of rare or obscure words is a highlight for me. Sometimes you have to read slowly, patiently, and with a lot of googling, but you come out of it holding a vividity of image usually reserved for the more grounded prose of Herman Melville or Cormac McCarthy. Looking into my brain and seeing the free-floating pirate city of Armada with such a ridiculous level of clarity is borderline addicting. I keep sweeping through the streets and smelling the brine and looking at all the bizarre crab people. Great stuff.
I’m also reading How to Invent Everything by Ryan North, a guide for stranded time travelers who want to recreate everything from welders to radios. Beyond how fun the concept is (helped along by interludes and footnotes laced with Douglas Adams-y humor), it’s also just a really neat way to learn how random fundamentals of human civilization work. Have you ever wondered what a steam engine is actually doing? What about how non-digital clocks keep time? Printing presses? Penicillin? Plows? Reading this gets you really mad about how shitty our plows were for thousands of years, but the invention of the bike makes up for it – almost.
I started the book out of plain curiosity, but I’m finding it to be an excellent aid in the dread-act of writers everywhere: worldbuilding. While it can easily murder an undisciplined story idea before it manages to crawl out of its crib, it’s a great excuse to learn if you approach it properly. Bad worldbuilding is writing down dozens of little, disconnected ideas with no underlying guidance and then never committing to any of them; good worldbuilding is learning as much as you can about history, anthropology, science, and the natural world with the vague aspiration of doing something with it, someday. At least if that novel never gets anywhere, you’ll still know a lot about Pukwudgies, cataract bogs, and Gallo-Roman culture.
To close off, the last thing I’ve been reading is From Ants to Zombies by – I wish it was easier to see who wrote it! – Alexander Chatziioannou. It’s a gorgeous, 600+ page collection of musings about horror games, and it’s one of the most enriching, lovingly considered compilations the subject has ever gotten. For reference, this is a book that dodges giving space to games like Silent Hill 2 to talk about dozens and dozens of titles I’m confident you’ve never heard of; text adventures and FMV games receive dedicated sections all to themselves, and a big focus is placed on horror games predating the release of the original Resident Evil. Ubiquitous titles like Dead Space receive the same amount of space (sometimes less) than games like Forbidden Forest and The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora.
For a genre so thoroughly choked by an endless critical whirlpool of people saying the same things about the same eight or nine games, something like this is revelatory. It’s an incredible way to access a trove of eclectic horror recommendations while hearing, paradoxical to the age of the games themselves, new things said about subjects you probably care about – since you’re opting into holding a book nearly as heavy as a newborn, I’m going to assume you’re not a dilettante. Go buy it!
That’ll do it for now! No real way to end this, so check out my girlfriend’s dog. Her name is Sadie, and she likes to lay near the heater whenever she can. Be like her, and be kind to each other.