Reviewed

Anomalies

We are looking for anomalies, says the professor, because nobody else is looking for them, and when nobody is looking for something the picture of the world is incomplete. It is her suspicion that the picture is even more incomplete than we realize.

[ read here ]

God, I have everything to say about Anomalies. It's unassuming. It's scarce. I'm sure it's not that obscure, but I've never seen anyone discussing it in the wild; I found it as a link with a short premise in an FAQ on Reddit of all places, not somewhere I expect to find anything interesting to read. But I did find it - stumbled on it - and it drove its dagger somewhere deep into my soul. Anomalies is powerful. It would be easy to say it is eerie, because in its own way, it is eerie, but what I feel reading it is a dark allure, this almost morbid desire to step into the skin of its protagonist and be swallowed up by something I cannot understand, to partake in some Wild Hunt, to stare into the unknown and know it is staring back. For my life to be altered.

This is not a mystery story. It's a story about mysteries, but that is a different thing entirely. Anomalies presents a world of infinitessimally small hauntings, so easy to overlook but so impossibly large in their implications - a world that almost invites you to believe, or at least, to wonder if it is your own - but it's not about that. It's about how people engage with the unknown; it's about being consumed and losing yourself in the best and worst of ways; it's about seeing things that have never been seen before; it's about -

I don't know what to say about the ending except that it is quite possibly the biggest gut-punch a piece of media has ever thrown at me. When I first read this comic and reached That Panel, I spent maybe a minute straight just staring in shock.

There is No Antimemetics Division

He understands his error now. He might as well have tried to poison the ocean. He sees the whole thing, Red's grotesque vision for the world, his/its immense, vicious promise. The rot is everywhere. Those hundred thousand infected are a foretaste. The spores are flourishing secretly in every aspect of reality: in people's lungs, in their minds, their words, in the soil, in the sky. Maggots and cancers and star signals.

[ read here ]

I'm honestly tempted to say TiNAD changed my perspective of what the SCP Wiki could be. That's really dramatic, but it was the first tale series I really enjoyed and engaged with and I still consider it, as a whole, one of the best pieces of writing on the wiki, in all its bleak, triumphant, violent glory. qntm maintains incredible, impossibly high stakes throughout the story without it becoming completely and overwhelmingly dark - each victory is met with a new loss, but they are still victories, and there is a constant promise that someone, somewhere, is working to undo all this. The imagery is fascinating. The action scenes, though sparse, are gripping. Even as the world of the Antimemetics Division comes into view, there are new surprises around every corner - there is never a feeling that things are going unexplained, but when you've finished the story and pull back to look it over, you find that mystery is still living and thriving in hidden alcoves and dark corners. The world of the Foundation has always been defined by the inexplicable, and antimemetics is perhaps the quintessential study of the unknown and unknowable - so it's almost masterful that TiNAD, even perfectly whole, leaves you with a few unanswered questions.

[ further reading ]

NOPE

In an hour, you will leave this place... changed.

Jordan Peele once again knocking it out of the fucking park. I love something I can mull over, something I can dissect, something I can explore - as you might have guessed from the rest of this page, aha - and NOPE delivers, with so many themes woven together into a narrative that is nonetheless clean and cohesive. Every piece of NOPE has its place. It is enthralling in its horror, and at times, horrific in its enthrall - spectacle, if you will.

NOPE is, to me, a story about sight. About seeing, and being seen. It's about the commodification of pain and violence, about voyeurism, about exploitative viewing; that is its most prominent theme, the one that really jumps off the screen, but there's more to it than that. There's the pursuit of sight as a force of destruction, something that pushes people to feed themselves to their obsession, and there's seeing and being seen as a force of good, a means of survival, which at first seems like a contradiction. I don't think it is. Sight is powerful, seeing is powerful. That power can be misused, but that doesn't mean it always is.

As a fun fact, the above quote comes exactly an hour before the end of the movie.

Goncharov

I had hoped it would be you. There are many men and many guns in this world, but yours is the only one I care to be at the end of.

Not a gun, then. Maybe a knife.

The choice of a passionate man.

Goncharov is the greatest mafia movie never made - and yes, I said never. Really, it's most likely a corruption of the real Scorsese movie Gomorrah, which ended up on a label which ended up on a pair of shoes which ended up on Tumblr, and two years later, took off like lightning. Goncharov is a film about Russian mobsters in Italy, about destiny, inevitability, inescapability, loss of identity. Goncharov is about the homoerotic tension between two men who know their story will end in blood. Goncharov is about clocks and broken mirrors. Most importantly, Goncharov is about Calvinball, collective storytelling, a new type of folklore for a new era of communication, and the utmost importance of committing to the bit.

Unreviewed

The Silt Verses

Isn’t this great? We each get to choose the thing that eats us.

My river.
My savage, terrible, lonely river.

Watership Down

The wind ruffled their fur and tugged at the grass, which smelt of thyme and self-heal. The solitude felt like a release and a blessing. The height, the sky and the distance went to their heads and they skipped in the sunset. "O Frith on the hills!" cried Dandelion. "He must have made it for us."
"He may have made it, but Fiver thought of it for us," answered Hazel. "Wait till we get him up here!"

Ted the Caver

Something was pulling the rope back into the cave!

The Dionaea House

So, about Boise. I best get to that now before someone finally catches up to me, and now it's really just a matter of time before I'm dragged through the front door of a house that smells like fresh bread and warm blood.
But as I said, they aren't houses.

[ part one, part two, part three, part four - note that parts two and four are shown in reverse chronological order ]

Minuit Moins Cinq (Five Minutes to Midnight)

I met two of my best friends at this gig, which basically makes it the best gig of my life, no offense to your horrifying hallucinatory experience.

[ read here ]