treeroutes
it's not going to haunt itself.
he/him. adult. white european. plant biologist. putting the hot in schizophrenic... wait.
#botanical horror
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Dawn Keetley's concept of tentacular ecohorror :
[ID : Nature is subordinated to the human in both of these dominant formations of ecohorror—the animal-oriented revenge-of-nature narrative and the vegetation-dominated plot of the concealing mass. In these variants of ecohorror, nature stands either as a blank backdrop upon which human motivation is imposed or as the inert landscape concealing a human drama. In the latter category especially, though, there is often the seed of something else—the moment when nature refuses to stay in the background. Evan Calder Williams has brilliantly described how nature comes “monstrously to the fore” in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). He points to scenes in which even the “life-and-death ordeal” of the protagonist—Sally chased by a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface—“becomes a distant signal obscured by wheat waving gently in the breeze." These junctures when nature refuses its place within the human mapping of the world gesture to a third category of ecohorror—a tentacular ecohorror, which describes the terrifying encounter with a nonhuman nature that reaches out to grab and entangle the human. Tentacular ecohorror is structured first by an encounter with a recalcitrantly alien form of life and second by a character’s becoming enmeshed with that life. Nature comes truly to the fore here, as it starts to do in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. But, unlike in those films, nature doesn’t stop, doesn’t give way to a concealed human, animal, or supernatural entity. Nature itself keeps coming. Its more ineffable threat doesn’t fade away to be replaced by the human or the monster. In its relentless coming, moreover, nature’s motives (if it has any) are inscrutable: it is not clearly propelled by revenge or by any recognizably human impulsion. Nature simply comes to the fore in all its irreducible alterity. end ID]
From "Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and
Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name", Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
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Christy Tidwell on botanical horror in Junji Ito's Uzumaki :
[ID : ...could also be related to the possibility of environmental apocalypse. Whatever the referent, apocalypticism and lack of closure define Uzumaki’s conclusion. Our protagonists are left in the horrific spiral city, knowing that this may all happen again and that there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
The spiral city’s imagery not only resonates with cosmic horror but also echoes the concerns of plant horror; both cosmic and plant horror move beyond the human, to different scales and temporalities. Dawn Keetley writes, in her introduction to Plant Horror, that “plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness” and that we often fear “being overrun, overcome, by vegetation—harbinger not only of death itself but of the ruin of culture, of our hard-built world.” This destruction of human worlds is made possible by what she describes as “the perennial and terrifying ability of vegetable life to swallow, engulf, overrun, and outlive humans.” The spiral city, too, is inscrutable and strange and even looks like vegetation. It spirals upward in the way leaves or vines do, reaching toward the light, and both plants and the spiral city “menace with their wild, purposeless growth.”
In its refusal to be mere background to human drama, the spiral also takes on elements of Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror.” Tentacular ecohorror, she writes, “is structured first by an encounter with a recalcitrantly alien form of life and second by a character’s becoming enmeshed with that life.” Ito’s spirals function similarly to the trees Keetley analyzes and are, if nothing else, “recalcitrantly alien.” Furthermore, Uzumaki concludes with a scene in which “uncanny alien nature entangles the human and ushers in new forms of life,” in which Kirie and Shuichi (and the rest of the people of Kurouzu-cho) become part of the spiral city, literally entangled and enmeshed with it. This scene promises future destruction “when the eternal spiral awakes once more,” and the spiral city echoes human fears of plants as “harbinger not only of death itself but of the ruin of culture” as well as fears of plants’ abilities to outlive humans. The new form of life ushered in here has no room for Kirie, Shuichi, and their fellow humans, yet the spiral city will continue and will return. Like plants, it moves and grows in cycles, and it will once again reach out toward the town at some undetermined future time. end ID]
From "Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror", Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
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-> THIGMOTROPISM
Tree roots following the pattern of concrete footpaths
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You dont have to censor words like drugs on tumblr
thank you but i already knew that, i just think it's funny to write it like this
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hello goodreads pals, my transMad abolitionist antipsych novel, Failure to Comply, now officially has a goodreads page! you can also see the preliminary shop page here (not avail for preorder yet but i will update when it is ofc!).
Failure to Comply uses experimental/hybrid poetics + science fiction/horror strategies to explore medico-psychiatric monopolies on Truth & Reality itself, and the thinking-loving-sensing-caring practices through which we can event new worlds. consider adding it / sharing / telling friends, and contact me if you want an ARC for advance review/publicity!
also, you can explore my dedicated tag for the Vibes and Energies of the novel :3
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Vienna Gambit declined : main line, bunny variation
[VD : view from above of a chess set after the first 10 moves of a game that started with a main line vienna opening. we see a brown bunny arrive, sniff the pieces, knock over some of them and leave, unbothered. end VD]
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from march 16th to march 24th, it is schizophrenia awareness week aka my birthday. i'll accept presents in the form of dr*gs, cigarettes, potted plants, cash and political actions against the psychiatric system.
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if you're a recovering addict, i want you to know you're doing good.
you didn't use today? you're doing good. you used recently and you're still recovering? you're doing good. you sought support today? you're doing good. you practiced harm reduction? you're doing good. you want to relapse and haven't? you're doing good. you're getting involved, even if others are doing more? you're doing good. you're resting today? you're doing good. you're alive? you're doing good.
this shit takes time. you have spent a considerable amount of time doing harmful things to yourself, or others. you're not going to change overnight. all you can reasonably do is get through the day, adding as much good to your life/the lives of others as you can. it doesn't matter what happened yesterday, or what's going to happen tomorrow.
all you have is this moment, and if you're on the path of recovery... you're doing good. this is your story. not someone else's. not some idealized version of yourself. it's yours, just as you exist, right now. that's all you have, and all you need.
keep going. you got this. i'm glad you're here (and so is everyone else who interacted with this post).
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[ID : photograph of a rusty metal staircase descending far down an large and unlit old looking well/downward tunnel. the well is filled halfway with water, the staircase keeps going under the water. emd ID]
Stairs down to the flooded level deep inside a mine.
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if i die in mysterious circumstances, look no further than the swedish mafia (i just added multiple paragraphs on illegal/criminal wood sourcing to the french ikea wikipedia page)
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whatever you call that kind of architecture, that's the good shit, someone please tell developpers that we need more of those in video games
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (2007) / What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)
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dream job local radio show host in antarctica. good evening everyone the sun is cowardly and the wind is razors. hug the person nearest to you and breathe together alive. its snowing again all white in my eyes when i look out its like angels homecoming. rest in peace jason and tim who saw something that got smaller the more it moved toward them and went outside to check it out. whatevers going on beyond here might as well be on another planet so its a slow news day as always. i will be seeing you in an hour again please enjoy martin solveig and the dragonettes hello
#text#writing#this would fit perfectly in any chapter of Michele Paver's Dark Matter#(were it not for martin solveig and dragonette i guess)
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just finished reading an incredible essay by Dr. Christy Tidwell called 'Spiraling Inward and Outward : Junji Ito's Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror' in which she examines how body horror, cosmic horror and ecohorror all intertwine in Uzumaki.
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2023.11.19 - National Center for Biotechnology Information
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dreaming up a syllabus for an imaginary course on metanarratives about gameplay, which i think would go something like:
unit 1: who do you think you are i am - auto-documentary & games
Vlogs and the Hyperreal, Folding Ideas
The Slow Death of Let's Play Videos, Meraki (to ~10:00)
World Record Progression: Mike Tyson, Summoning Salt
ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, hbomberguy
Life as a Bokoblin: A Zelda Nature Documentary, Monster Maze
optional: Braindump on the History of Let's Plays, slowbeef
unit 2: what like it's hard? - intro to challenge narratives
Chapter 26: Games as Narrative Play: Two Structures for Narrative Play, Rules of Play
A different kind of challenge run: Minimalist 100% (BOTW), Wolf Link
Surviving 100 Days on Just Dirt, Mogswamp
Can You Beat DARK SOULS III with Only Firebombs, the Backlogs
Is it Possible to Beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching?, Ceave Gaming
The Pacifist Challenge - Beating Hollow Knight Without Collecting Soul [CHALLENGE] - Sample
optional: How to 100% Snowpeak Ruins in under 15 minutes, bewildebeest
unit 3: nelly you don't understand, i AM the narrative - form and function
The Future of Writing about Games, Jacob Geller
Can You Beat GRIME Without Weapons?, the Backlogs
Mushroom Kingdom Championships, Ceave Gaming
My Life as a Barber in Hitman 2, MinMax (Leo Vader)
MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod, PowerPak
optional: Mega Microvideos, Matthewmatosis
the theme and structure is mostly intended to introduce at least one critical or historically contextual work followed by examples of the type of narrative in question.
in unit 1, this is the idea of "How do people talk about their own experiences in the context of YouTube and playing video games?" across three rather different kinds of documentaries. unit 2 is intended to take that lens of who is telling what tale and dial in on challenge running, where i first noticed the way some videos turn the story of overcoming a challenge into its own narrative that is distinct from but related to the narrative events of the game itself. unit 3 circles back to the bigger picture with a variety of examples that, to me, are maximally metanarrative, the emergent story of the player-narrator now functionally replacing the game's embedded narrative.
bonus unit: broken narratives
Glitch & the Grotesque at the MLA, Sylvia Korman
Watching time loop movies to escape my time loop, Leo Vader
The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play, Folding Ideas
Breaking Madden, Jon Bois
The TRUTH about the Pizzaplex in FNAF: Security Breach, AstralSpiff
this one is highly underdeveloped, but i'd love to work out something more robust building on randomizer challenges that produce intentionally bizarre, semi-ironic "lore," and bois-esque endeavors to break games so hard the story itself crumbles. but that's really out of scope so i'm just including the links to things i couldn't bear to get rid of. more rambling abt the challenge runs I chose under the cut.
Challenge runs represent one of the most obvious places to start, due to being extremely plentiful and having a hook that makes a "here's how I did X thing in Y video game" format almost unavoidable. Minimalist 100% is an underrated and sweet straightforward example that I mostly include as a baseline for reporting-out style narrative; here are the facts, here's what happened, this is the thing that it is. Mogswamp's 100 Days on Just Dirt is similar in style, but the physical measuring of days is a delightful and, more importantly, external narrative device.
Now oriented, we get a taste of Ceave Gaming's narrative approach to Mario challenges with the no-crouching run, and while we still aren't at the degree of player-characters being constructed for the narrative's sake, the spirited belief in crouching sets the stage for other rhetoric in more extreme cases we'll see later.
The Backlogs' entire body of work qualifies here, but GRIME is the strongest inspiration for putting this list together. I include the DS3 firebombs run because what was initially a factual description of how his wife's use of firebombs inspired him to play differently in the original DS1 firebombs run has developed into full-blown multi-game narrative arc with the Firebomb Goddess (his wife, who also voices the character) compelling his in-game character to achieve his destined quest. Grime takes that even further,
In-Game Documentaries
I include Life as a Bokoblin mostly as a contrast to My Life as a Barber - there is a level of fictionalization and roleplay involved in the Zelda in-game documentary that highlights exactly what I want to single out when I am talking about metanarrative, the story about a story.
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tramp stamp that says "no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality"
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